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MASKS AND DEMONS 


vw 








HA RCOUE TBE ACE & OO 


COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY 
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. 


PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. 





CONTENTS 


INITIATION 


MAGIC 


TOTEM MASKS—lIvory Coast, New Britain, ey New 
Guinea, British Columbia 


DEMON MASKS—tTibet, Congo, New Guinea, British 
Columbia, New York and Canada (Iroquois) : 


MEDICINE MASKS—Ceylon, Arizona (Navaho) 


AWE 
A MUMMY MASK—Egypt 


SPIRITUALISTIC MASKS—New Ireland, New Heb- 
rides, Liberia, Congo, Slave Coast, New Britain 


A SKULL MASK—Mexico 


IDOL MASKS—Guatemala Beco Mexico, Yucatan 
(Maya) Oe are a llnn ee 


DISCIPLINARY MASKS—New Britain, Congo, New 
Guinea : are ee 5 


A DIVINE MASK—Delaware 


WAR ee) APAN, Alaska, British Columbia, New 
Guinea ‘ : : fore ; 


CARNIVAL MASKS—The Tyrol 


INITIATION MASKS—New erinee Arizona Sai 
British Columbia 
tv] 


Page 
Vii 


14 


CONTENTS 


LEGEND 
Page 
AUTOMATIC MASKS—British Columbia . . . .~ 86 
RAIN-MAKING MASKS—New Mexico ase Arizona 
(Hopi) . go 
DIONYSIAC MASKS—Northern New York and Canada 
(Iroquois), Brazil, New Mexico (Zuni) . : 100 
THE PLAY BEGINS 
HEROIC MASKS—Greece, Japan . ' ; : . 106 
ADMONITORY MASKS—China, Tibet deo Ee retary 
THEATRICAL MASKS—Siam, Bes Slave Coast, New 
Guinea, Ceylon ... 140 
EXORCISM : F : : Pa ee : ae : foero 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . . . (9 35 
THE LINE DRAWINGS . = . 2. 0 ee 


[vi] 





INITIATION 


HE mask is not to be carelessly assumed or 
lightly put off. Primitive man knows that 
there must be initiation and a certain ceremony. 
If he puts on a false face without the proper in- 
cantation, there will be no power in it. It may 
be the same with books—or at any rate with a 
book about the mask. 

There are certain things that one should know 
before looking at a mask. They have to do with 
the mind and the faith of primitive man. This 
book, with its pictures and its words, is intended 
to tell the man who looks at a mask drawn by 
Craig or a mask made by Dulac, Stern, or Benda 
various facts that he should know about their 
ancestors, the holy masks of simpler men. This 
foreword is intended to initiate him into those 
mysteries of medicine men and demons which 
he must know before he can put on knowledge 
of the mask. 

Now the mask is older than the idol. It is as 
old as democracy—that state which existed be- 
fore armies and kings, writing and science, and 
which has never existed since. It was in a 
democracy, not alone of men but of spirits, too, 
that you lived, primitive man who invented the 
mask. Your faith was animism. Everything 
about you, living or dead, was possessed by a 
spirit. So were you. You dreamed, and your 


[ vii | 


INITIATION 


soul went hunting while your body lay in a hut. 
Everything that moved—the bush, the river, 
the smoke—must have a spirit, too. The spirit 
went out of the body when it died, but it could 
go into some strange-shaped stone or a piece of 
carving. Such a thing had power. The spirit 
in a tree or the spirit in a stone—which is fetish 
—had no more potency, perhaps, than the spirit 
in a man; but it was more mobile and illusive, 
harder to get at. It could shift about and take 
another form. It could injure you even when 
you were most alert. You might guard against 
the attack of a living enemy. But his spirit, 
especially his dead spirit, was another matter. 
Some way must be found to control so powerful 
a thing. 

This is the beginning of the kind of science 
we call magic—and the beginning of religion 
and priesthood, too. 

As a primitive man you recognized no limita- 
tions to your own power. Spirits, you knew, 
could be fooled, frightened, or coerced. Men 
could be injured, demons appeased, animals could 
be made plentiful and easy to kill, or rain could 
be made to fall, and crops to grow, if only you 
knew the proper way of going about it, the 
charms and actions and substances that control 
spirits. Partly by accident, partly by inspira- 
tion, you learned these things. You learned, 
for instance, that if you imitated an event, the 
event was sure to happen. If you stalked about 
like a deer, munching leaves, deer would be 
plentiful. If you climbed up a tree, and poured 
water on the ground, rain would follow. This 
is Sympathetic magic. If you made a little mud 

[ viii | 


INITIATION 


figure, named it for your enemy, and stuck 
thorns in it, your enemy would die. That is 
witchcraft, too. If you made certain offerings 
to the spirit in a tree, it would stop plaguing 
you. If you burned sweet-smelling herbs and 
warm flesh in front of the strange-shaped stone, 
its spirit would obey you. 

Magic and the coercing of spirits are not such 
ancient things that we cannot find them in Eu- 
rope or America today. The anger of a patriot 
when someone stamps on his flag or burns it, 
goes deeper than any Maeterlinckian passion for 
symbols. He sees magic. A racial memory rec- 
ognizes an attack on the very body of the State. 
In Sicily in 1893 there came a great drought, 
and prayers for rain, blessed palm leaves hung 
in the orchards, and church dust thrown on the 
fields had no effect. So the congregation pun- 
ished the saints for their neglect. They put St. 
Joseph out in the fields to see for himself, and 
they stripped, threatened, insulted, and ducked 
other holy statues. 

Now in the beginning magic is the business 
of every man. But soon he recognizes that a 
peculiar kind of intelligence is needed for the 
job. One savage proves particularly successful 
as a magician. Specialization and division of 
labor begin. The shaman, the medicine man, 
is created. He is on his way to being king and 
priest. 

It is a habit of modernity to imagine the medi- 
cine man merely a crafty fellow deceiving his 
tribesmen for the sake of power and gain. Since 
the medicine man is probably the inventor of 
the mask, it is worth ea ea that he is the 

1X 


INITIATION 


first dupe. He begins by believing in magic as 
fervently as any savage. If he did not, he would 
never assume the risks of his trade. For, if the 
Catholic will insult a saint, a disappointed savage 
will kill an unsuccessful wizard. 

Success only increases the difficulties of the 
medicine man. The potent shaman becomes a 
sort of priestly king. His person, his life, his 
health, and his spiritual power are of the utmost 
importance to the tribe. He must live a regi- 
mented life. Magic can work upon him, and pro- 
hibitions, or taboos, are set up to protect him 
from harm. He can’t put his foot to the ground, 
or look at the sea, or eat the most popular fruit, 
or live anywhere but chained in the crater of an 
extinct volcano. On top of such disabilities, the 
people may decide that, since the whole pros- 
perity of the tribe depends on the perfect health 
and power of the priest-king, he must not die by 
illness or old age. At the first sign of feeble- 
ness, they kill him—or perhaps at the end of 
so many years. Respect for kingship breeds 
regicide. Small wonder that prospective kings 
in certain parts of West Africa must be elected 
by secret ballot, and caught and enthroned be- 
fore they can take steps to escape the honor! 

The murdered king has the satisfaction, how- 
ever, of becoming a most powerful spirit. When 
man graduates from animism into a kind of 
primitive polytheism, he makes his gods out of 
his ancestors; and great chiefs, great medicine 
men, become great spirits—saints we would call 
them. Their life stories and their deaths are of 
tremendous importance in their worship. Par- 
ticularly their deaths, oa gods that die always 

x 


INITIATION 


seem the most popular. The death of Dionysus 
and his rebirth, and the similar death and re- 
birth of an endless string of other deities share 
with sympathetic magic—of which they are a 
part—the centre of the stage in primitive rell- 
gion. Both are of vital importance to man when 
he begins to eat the seeds of grasses as well as 
the flesh of animals. Other factors in the reli- 
gion of early man vary greatly, but rain-making 
magic and the story of the earth’s resurrection 
in the resurrection of a god are constant. 

The mask is one of the variable features that 
arise out of the spirit-traffic of primitive man. 
It is a sort of animated fetish through which he 
works magic and controls the spirits. Some 
races are too low to conceive of the idea of a 
false face into which a god will go when a man 
wears it. No races are too high not to have some 
trace of it in their history, and even in their 
present customs. Today the mask is used by 
savages in New Guinea, by barbarians in Africa, 
by half-civilized Indians in South America, 
Ecuador, New Mexico, and Alaska, and by 
what we call civilized men in Thrace, Siberia, 
and the Alps. 

The origins of the mask are dark and dubious. 
It may have come out of the hunt; it may have 
been a magic for controlling game. It may be 
a product of totemism, man’s personal relation- 
ship to an animal into which he has sent his soul 
for safekeeping. Some Negroes say it started 
as a device for frightening children; other Ne- 
groes, with unconscious irony, trace its inven- 
tion to a Ku Klux Klan for escaping publicity 
while punishing marauders. A distinguished 


[xi] 


INITIATION 


ethnologist got up a fanciful story about the 
evolution of the mask from the shield. War 
paint is a better ancestor. 

If the beginning of the mask is as dubious as 
it is fascinating, its end is even more fascinating 
and not at all dubious. For the end of the mask 
is Drama. When a man puts on a mask he ex- 
periences a kind of release from his inhibited 
and bashful and circumscribed soul. He can 
say and do strange and terrible things, and he 
likes it. When Al Jolson puts on black-face he 
becomes a demoniac creature, privileged in his 
humor, insensate in his vitality; without the 
burnt cork something of his possession is gone. 
When a primitive man fits a mask on his head, 
he begins to imitate, and he finds this histrio- 
nism a kind of sport he cannot give up. Imita- 
tion develops into story telling. Story telling 
breeds legend. Legend is Theatre. And the 
greatest legend of all, the legend of death and 
resurrection, carries man on into the greatest 
drama, Greek tragedy. 

The point at which masked ritual becomes 
commercial theatre, the point at which masking 
for the spirit’s sake passes over into paid mum- 
mery for pleasure, is hard to trace. Sometimes 
it marks the decay of religious drama, as in 
Greece. Sometimes it occurs before religious 
drama, and then the higher art is never born. 
Medicine men find gifts thrust upon them, and 
they exact more. Masked secret societies be- 
come blackmailing plunderbunds. At some point 
in the development of civilization methods of 
terrorization, either psychic or physical, become 
impossible. Then the masker must begin to 


[xii] 


INITIATION 


please, to amuse, to excite. The masked May 
Spirits of England and Germany still gather 
gifts while disguised in green leaves—there is 
magic in that. In Philadelphia and many east- 
ern cities children go about on Thanksgiving 
Day in masks and crazy costumes begging pen- 
nies. All the mad masking of Europe, from the 
miracle plays to the carnivals, and from Venice 
to old London, lies this side of magic, and very 
close to the theatre. 

It is the purpose of the following pages to try 
to bridge by just a little the gap that lies be- 
tween the primitive man who puts a sort of idol 
on his face, and the Greek tragedian; between 
the Duk-Duk dancer who regulates morals and 
acquires riches in New Guinea, and some artist 
of the theatre who wishes to bring the mask 
back to the stage. 


a (2 we oy 
Wi, ee (4 Wn 





[xiii] 


» 





MASKS AND DEMONS 








HE first mask and the last—the mask of the 
aborigine and the mask of the débutante— 
is face paint. But somewhere very close to the 
beginning of all this mummery of false faces is 
the mask of the animal. Man starts as the 
hunter. His first business is to get close to the 
game,.or to bring the game close to him. In the 
forest this is easy. Out upon the plains or in 
the pitiless publicity of the ice floe he must 
have a decoy and a disguise. If he is an Eskimo 
in quest of a seal, he flops across the ice in his 
fur garments and pointed hood, imitating the 
clumsy movements of his prey. If he is an In- 
dian of the plains, he throws a buffalo skin over 
his back, crawls on his knees, and bleats like a 
bull-calf. Imitation and disguise have begun. 
It is short step to masking. Back in camp, cele- 
brating his exploit, he acts out the story of the 
hunt. With immense detail and astonishing 
fidelity he pictures himself as both hunter and 
hunted. Soon he is wearing the skin of the ani- 
mal he has killed. Soon his own head is thrust 
inside the head of his quarry. Nature has sup- 
plied him with a ready-made mask. Before he 
carves out of wood such a mask as this antelope 
from the Ivory Coast of Africa—a thing of 
superb grace in its curves of yellow, black, and 
brown—a new idea must enter his head. It is 
the idea:of Totem. 


[3] 





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OME peoples are too primitive to make 

masks. None are too wise to believe in 
magic. The abysmal bushmen of Australia do 
not carve themselves false faces; they do not 
even use animals’ heads. Their speech is so 
debased that they cannot understand one another 
without the use of gesture; therefore they can- 
not talk in the dark. But the bushman sees 
Spirits in all things, and works magic upon these 
spirits for his own ends. He acts long symbolic 
dramas to let the spirits know his wants. If he 
fears a dearth of kangaroos or grasshoppers or 
whatever else may furnish forth his table, he 
acts a little play in which these things are shown 
coming to be killed. The kangaroos will natu- 
rally do likewise. Man has cast the spell of sym- 
pathetic magic upon them. In much this fashion 
the Mandan Indians “danced buffalo” when 
Grant was the White Father in Washington. 
Covered with buffalo hides, and with their heads 
where the skulls of the bison once were, they 
pranced and chanted in a circle, and shot and 
skinned one another before they ventured forth 
upon a hunt. When the fishing season begins in 
New Guinea the Papuans dance in masks weirdly 
emblematic of the saw fish. This fish-mouthed 
mask from New Britain doubtless served a simi- 
lar purpose in increasing marine life and making 
it tractable to the hook. 


[5] 





4? 





RIMITIVE man has other uses for animals 
than to eat them. They make a fairly safe 
resting place for his immortal but often trouble- 
some soul. A man’s body isa fragile thing. The 
malignity of some other being may spill his spirit 
out. What is simpler and wiser than to adopt 
the indomitable lion, the gigantic elephant, the 
wily serpent, or the terrible gorilla as a sort of 
Spiritual safe deposit box? That is Totem. So 
long as the animal lives, the man is safe. If he 
puts a taboo on his totem-animal, and forbids 
himself and his totem-brothers to kill or eat it, 
his life and his happiness may be long. And if 
he dances and makes plays to increase the num- 
bers of his totem, his prosperity will be truly 
extraordinary. Thus totem is the basic religious 
idea of the hunting man. It is his way of mak- 
ing the spiritual life work. The Greeks had 
totems before they knew Dionysus, and their 
girls danced in the masks of bears before Thespis 
smeared his face with purslane and “invented” 
the mask. Hebrews and Britons once traced 
their descent from totem-animals. All America 
was the land of totemism before the Spaniards 
came. This gnarled gorilla mask from the Ivory 
Coast once hid and nourished the spirit of some 
forest clan when a medicine man danced in it. 


[7] 








Qo of the animal comes morality. Sin— 
murder and incest—they spring from the 
totem. Sons and daughters of the same ances- 
tral bear may not marry, neither may they slay 
their brothers. And out of the animal arise the 
secret society and the fraternal organization. 
Cutting across the totem-clans are brotherhoods 
united not by blood but by initiation and pledge, 
and named for some patron animal. The Be- 
nevolent and Protective Order of Elks stems off 
from the Human Leopard Society of Sierra 
Leone, and the goat of the lodge may claim rela- 
tionship with the masked wolves who bring back 
the Indian initiate from the land of make- 
believe death into which the blank cartridge of 
the chief of an Alaskan Wolf Society has sent 
him. Thus animals bind men together and keep 
them apart—even before the coming of the gods. 
Sometimes, indeed, the animals are the gods 
themselves. This ant-bear from the Congo is 
no ordinary totem. In its left ear is the sun, 
and in its right the moon. When the Bushongo 
dance with such masks upon their heads they are 
not so far removed from their ancestors who 
came up out of Egypt, land of Horus with the 
hawk’s head, and of Ibis-crested Thoth. Totems 
grow up into gods. 


[9] 








HE totem-animal can draw social lines quite 
as nicely as moral ones. If it is wicked to 
kill your clan-brother, it may be almost as rep- 
rehensible to eat with a man whose animal an- 
cestor is less ancient and powerful than yours. 
The pride of the leopard men speaks in their 
mask. The totem defines the clan, and estab- 
lishes blood relationship. And blood relation- 
ship is the beginning of family pride. The war- 
rior paints his totem-animal on his shield, or he 
may even wear his mask into battle. The 
Homeric Greeks bore devices on their bucklers, 
and medizval knights elevated their totems to 
the crests of their helmets. Social exclusiveness 
is never the fetish in the democracy of primitive 
man that it is in civilized communities. Yet out 
of the lines drawn by the totem comes the snob- 
bism of the coat of arms. The crested lion on 
the notepaper of the marquis, and this mask 
from New Guinea are sisters under the skin. 


[zr] 








AL worship ends in play. Initiation 
breeds drama. The African Negro who 
makes a god out of an antelope ends by dancing 
in his mask just for the pleasure of dancing. 
The Indian who carves forty-foot totem-poles, 
and acts out epic legends of his tribal animals 
in order to populate land and water is soon the 
proprietor of a sort of mechanical wax works. 
The native Americans that fringe the Pacific 
coast from Vancouver Island to Alaska make 
wooden and copper masks with a beauty that 
sometimes suggests the masks of Japan; but 
their specialty is a type of mechanical headdress 
operated by strings and hinges. The mask and 
the marionette meet in such a contrivance as this 
killer whale of the Kwakiutl Indians of British 
Columbia. The head of the dancer is hidden 
somewhere in this four-and-a-half-foot length of 
hollowed wood, while his hands are busy with 
strings which move the fins, tail, and mouth of 
the creature. Endlessly occupied with such 
marvels of mechanism, the Indian devotee loses 
the thread of the ancient totemic legend, and 
finds himself playing with an amusing dramatic 
toy. 


[13] 








1 there is time enough and if the mind of the 
worshipper is sufficiently flexible, an animal 
can become totem and god, ancestor and demon, 
and his mask can end by holding a place, twenty 
centuries later, in religious processions and pan- 
tomimic dances designed to attract, amuse, and 
edify the people. In ancient Tibet, before the 
faith of the Hindu Buddha had penetrated to the 
north and turned Chinese, the land was plenti- 
fully supplied with animal gods who were little 
better than demons. The raven, messenger of 
the supreme spirit, stole holy offerings. The 
tiger, feared and worshipped all over Asia, some- 
what mitigated his offenses by assisting at the 
New Year expulsion of demons, doubtless on 
homeopathic principles. This Rakshasi, one of 
a family of female giants, began as a man-eating 
demon of India. Through the infatuation of a 
sacred monkey the Tibetans are able to claim 
descent from this demon, and thus, presumably, 
to keep her demonism in check. Her mask now 
plays a part in a holy admonitory drama. 


[15] 





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aE luxuriant forests of the tropics, throng- 
ing with man-eating animals, poisonous 
plants, venomous snakes, and unwholesome in- 
sects, are naturally the haunts of multitudes of 
demons. There are jungles in Africa through 
which it is considerably more than a man’s life 
is worth to pass without protection against 
devils. Now masks are peculiarly efficacious. 
To change your face is even more baffling and 
potent than to change your name. Among a 
myriad of evil spirits, however, it becomes diff- 
cult for the layman to know the personal qualli- 
ties and prejudices of the particular devil in 
hand. Certain carvings and colors on the mask, 
certain words and chants, above all certain 
dances, are effective against unusually obstrep- 
erous spirits. To know these things calls for 
specialization. The medicine man, or shaman, 
arises, skilled by much learning and long prac- 
tice. Even a particular kind of shaman develops 
to cater to the demon-trade. Devils are notori- 
ously jealous. Rather than tolerate competi- 
tion, a well-established demon will decamp. An 
astute Negro appoints himself a pseudo-devil. 
Masked in some such face as this from the 
Congo, with magical vermilion squares upon its 
white temples, dressed in a suit of nicely fitting 
net, and followed by a boy with a bag to collect 
gifts of food and money, the fellow goes fear- 
lessly about the country banishing the evil ones. 


[17] 








1 ps Melanesia demons grow so bold that they 
leave the forests, and take up their abode in 
the native houses. When they make their pres- 
ence felt by famine, earthquake, epidemic, or 
other disaster, it becomes necessary for the whole 
town to rise and drive them out. Communal 
activity must replace individual initiative in the 
business of vanquishing devils. In Australia, 
where the bushmen are backward in this as in 
most matters, painting the face with stripes of 
red and yellow, and daubing the body white are 
considered protection enough for a battle with 
the demons. In Celebes, however, as many na- 
tives wear masks as can do so, and the rest paint 
their faces even blacker than nature has done. 
Then, having removed their belongings a little 
distance from the village and dwelt there for 
some days, they dash into their old houses armed 
with swords, spears, and clubs, and belabor the 
demons until they are glad to cry quits and flee. 
The Papuans of New Guinea are even more sys- 
tematic. They make an annual event of devil- 
chasing, a sort of spring-cleaning of the village. 
They dance for the spirits—perhaps in such 
masks as this striking one of carved and hol- 
lowed wood—feast them upon the souls of pigs, 
yams, and fowl laid out on tables by the road- 
side, and then drum them out of town by beat- 
ing on the house posts. 


[19] 








fe ONS are by no means an exclusive fea- 
ture of the tropics. North America and 
_ Europe have known them, and they trouble the 
Arctic Circle. The Eskimo of Point Barrow 
have particular difficulty with a mischievous 
spirit called Tuna, and those of Baffin Land are 
sorely troubled by Sedna, mistress of the under- 
world. Since it is only the western branch of 
the Eskimo that has acquired the use of masks 
from the Pacific Coast Indians, the inhabitants 
of Baffin Land are at a disadvantage when the 
crash of ice floes and the moan of long winds 
carry the voices of spirits out of the sea. De- 
mons are not the only supernatural beings 
against whom it is wise to guard. The Aleuts 
of westernmost Alaska fear even their gods 
enough to mask the eyes of men who dance be- 
fore them with false faces whose eyeholes show 
them only the ground, and to leave such masks 
at burial places for the use of their dead in the 
other world. Farther south, among the Indians 
of Vancouver Island, we find this huge wooden 
face with its unblinking tinny eyes, perhaps the 
mask of some village against the evil spirits 
that sweep out of the Pacific on the western 
winds. 


[ar] 









i in a rn pee ih f R. 


ey EONS of a peculiar sort used to trouble 
the Iroquois. Doubtless they still annoy 
the more straight-laced of the tribe. These were 
the Ga-go-sa or False Faces. They were spirits 
that had no arms, no legs, no bodies. They 
existed simply as terrible heads which might be 
seen jumping from tree to tree in lonely places. 
They plagued mankind with all manner of ail- 
ments. To rid themselves of the Ga-go-sa the 
Iroquois organized a secret society called the 
False Face Company. During the first part of 
the last century it was headed by a woman, and 
she was the only one who knew the names of 
those in the society. Once a year these Indians, 
dressed in tattered skins, shaking rattles of tur- 
tle shell, and wearing hideous red masks with 
crescent noses, twisted grins, or horribly pro- 
truding mouths, career through the villages 
evacuating the demons as the last act in a kind 
of feast of sin which recalls the Saturnalia, the 
Hilaria, and other masked revels of the Roman 
world. Today in the Tyrolean Alps peasants 
wearing fur garments and twisted masks, some 
of which are astonishingly like those of the 
False Faces, invade houses and scatter ashes 
upon the inmates, insuring fecundity to the 
women, expelling demons, and curing various 
ills. This mask of one of the False Face Com- 
pany of the Seneca is more jovial than most. 


[23] 














N Burmah the treatment indicated for cholera 
is to expel the demons by scaring them out 

of the houses with noise, and then beating them 
with sticks when they reach the roofs. This 
may prove efficacious, but it is hardly so attrac- 
tive as the more scientific method of the mask. 
At Fuchow in 1858 masks of white and black 
devils and of animals were used extensively in 
curbing the cholera, and even tiny children in 
China can frighten off the demon of measles by 
wearing the proper paper masks at sunset. But 
Ceylon is the land in which the cure of disease 
by the laying on of masks has been brought to 
perfection. There are nineteen masks of nine- 
teen devils of the nineteen diseases in the official 
pharmacopeeia. When a medicine man treats a 
patient he usually erects an altar in the sick room 
and decks it with flowers and foods. Then he 
dances in the mask and the disguise appropriate 
to the demon causing the disease. Repeated 
three times, at sunset, midnight, and dawn, this 
lures the evil spirit out of the sick man, and into 
the devil-dancer. By proceeding to the edge of 
the village, and feigning death for a short time, 
the medicine man is able to rid himself, as well 
as the invalid and the town, of the baleful 
demon. Here we have the wooden mask of 
Naja, demon of leprosy. The faces of all nine- 
teen devils are sometimes displayed on a single 
huge mask for use in oer of doubtful diagnosis. 

[25 





a 


beet 





ODS, rather than demons, are employed in the 

therapy of the southwestern Indians. These 
tribes are little troubled with evil spirits, and 
rejoice in an extensive pantheon of ancestor-gods 
who can be calied upon to cure wealthy chief- 
tains and bring rain by taking part in elaborate 
ceremonials of dance, legend, and symbol. In 
one of the cures administered by the Navaho 
medicine men the younger war god, Tobadzist- 
sini, is an assistant. He is materialized in this 
mask of soft red leather ornamented with white 
scalp knots. Because the Navaho are roving 
herdsmen, they use a mask that is easily folded 
and packed instead of the stiff and derby-like 
dome that the Zuni and Hopi employ when call- 
ing out their own deities or borrowing Tobad- 
zistsini. In the Navaho mythology, the first 
three worlds were most unsatisfactory. They 
moved a great deal and made the people sick. 
Later versions of the cosmos cannot have been 
much better, for, while the first was destroyed by 
a whirlwind, the second by hailstones, and the 
third by smallpox, it is recorded that the fourth 
was destroyed by coughing, and the fifth had to 
rid itself of monsters through the agency of 
Tobadzistsini and his elder brother. 


[27] 








i happens sometimes that even a mask will not 
succeed in making a sick man well. It need not, 
however, desert him at the door of death. With 
certain peoples it follows him into the grave. In 
the ruins of Mycene there were gold masks upon 
the dead. Funeral processions in Rome included 
men wearing portrait masks of the family’s illus- 
trious ancestors, while a wax mask of the dead 
man was placed upon his statue in the home. In 
Cambodia and Siam golden masks covered the 
faces of dead kings, and masks of gold, silver, 
bronze, and terra cotta have been found in burial 
spots from Mesopotamia and Pheenicia, through 
the Crimea and the Danube valley to Gaul and 
even Britain. The Alaskans buried masks with 
their dead to protect them from seeing the 
gods, and false faces figure in Japanese funeral 
ceremonies. The most notable use of the mortu- 
ary mask was upon the mummies of Egypt, but 
in Peru, where mummification was also practiced, 
each huddled bundle of bones was crowned with 
a mask placed upon a false head or cushion 
fastened to the top of the mummy. In Peru 
masks were worn in many religious ceremonials, 
and it is far more than probable that the animal- 
headed deities of Egypt were represented by such 
masked priests as appear on Babylonian carvings. 
This mummy mask from Egypt resembles in 
general shape and materials the papier-maché 
masks of the Chinese ae drama. 
29 








OURNING for the dead of New Ireland is 
conveniently concentrated in the month of 

June. At this season the natives of the most 
easterly island of the Bismarck Archipelago 
gather together, under the guidance of a secret 
society, to wear or display carved masks repre- 
senting the departed. These masks are, in fact, 
the incarnate dead, and, as each relative is recog- 
nized, the crowd shouts his name, and makes 
wild lamentation. There are three kinds of 
masks at the mourning festival. This crested 
mask, carved with almost the distinction of an 
African false face, is the only variety worn by the 
dancers of the secret society. In origin, at any 
rate, it is not spiritualistic. The crest, which sug- 
gests both the Greek helmet and the feather 
helmet of Hawaii, represents the hair of the 
dancer as it used to be arranged for the mourning 
ceremony. Bleached with lime and dyed yellow, 
it stood up in a great ridge above the shaven sides 
of the head, upon which stones and various bright 
objects were plastered for decoration. Men who 
felt they could not attain the ideal of manly 
beauty, or who disliked the labor of preparing 
such a coiffure, made a mask instead. In this 
they expressed with utter artistic freedom the 
classic perfection of mourning. A lugubrious 
parallel to the powdered wig of Georgian days! 


[31] 





Hi ani 


| mt 
ye 


== 





eve man is wise enough not to 
depend on spirit photographs for evidence 
of the return of the dead. He fashions a solid 
and absolutely recognizable spirit in the shape of 
a wooden mask—the spirit literally materialized. 
In the yearly mourning ceremonies of New Ire- 
land, while members of the secret society execute 
pantomimic dances in mourning masks, the 
crowd laments over such well-remembered faces 
as this two-foot creature of carved and painted 
wood. Here in the twistings of red, white, and 
blue frets, in the gleaming eye of snail shell with 
its bright green pupil, in the beard of white, 
brown, and orange cotton, and above all in the 
emblematic bird perched upon the top—personal 
totem of the departed—the mourners recognize 
the beloved ectoplasm. There can be no scoffers. 
Materialists cannot protest against the flimsy 
character of the evidence. The spiritualistic 
manifestation is perfect. At the end of the 
séance it is retired with the rest of its fellows 
to the club house of the society, and there rests 
quietly in the spirit world until the next May 
comes round. 


[33] 








MASK need not be worn to be a mask. And 
it need not take the ordinary shape of the 
human head in order to harbor a departed spirit. 
Here, for example, in this hollow column of red 
and blue and white and black carvings is a kind 
of animated totem pole which is not only inhab- 
ited by a spirit but can be instantly recognized 
by a native of New Ireland as “poor dear Uncle 
John.” Towering structures of this sort, some- 
times equipped with carved wings or ears quite 
as tall, are supported and, if they are not too 
heavy, worn upon the head by relatives of the 
dead during the annual mourning ceremonies. 
They are seldom carried through the village, but 
are stationed near the enclosure that protects 
from the contaminating eyes of the women the 
house in which the masks are made and kept 
from year to year. The identification of these 
masks—which the mourners recognize instantly 
and loudly hail—is accomplished largely through 
the symbolic totem animals carved upon them. 
Each native has a bird of one sort or another for 
its “manu” or private guardian spirit. All other 
animals in the carvings are evil. Triumphant 
victories of the birds over snakes and lizards— 
the most malignant of spirits—are depicted on 
these spiritualistic masks. 


[35] 








PIRITUALISM dominates the masking of 
most primitive peoples. It cannot be other- 
wise with men who see a ghost in every tree, and 
look for good deeds and bad from the departed. 
The dead, intangible and powerful, must be wor- 
shipped and kept contented. The Egyptians, far 
beyond such mere animism, sent part of this 
world into the next to serve the departed. Food, 
clothing, dogs, models of boats or graneries be- 
longing to the dead are found in the tombs. 
African and Aztec savages have not balked at 
human sacrifice to send servants along, as well. 
More naive people like the Melanesians see no 
division between this world and the world of 
spirits. Therefore they are content if they can 
bring back the dead, and offer them service and 
homage in their villages. Masks serve in many 
ceremonials—initiations, war dances, magic for 
the increase of crops and animals—but at the 
heart of all of them is the spiritualistic notion 
that a spirit that was once a man has returned in 
amask. The dead neighbor is only a lesser spirit; 
the demon, only a greater. This four-faced thing 
of bark cloth and mud from New Hebrides may 
be used in one ceremonial or another, but it is the 
mask of an incarnate spirit, whether some East 
Indian Janus or a chief terrible as a Hydra in 
battle. 


[37] 








ee LISM overshadows demonology on 

the dark continent so far as the mask is con- 
cerned. The business of bringing back the dead 
is one of the major industries of West Africa— 
and not the least profitable. Private enterprise 
has replaced the official activities of the medicine 
man, and companies of young Negroes keep 
themselves busy impersonating the dead, and 
levying taxes on the living. The older and more 
respectable form of the ghost dance is connected 
with burial. Among the Ibos of Nigeria, be- 
tween the first interment of a corpse and the 
second, when a wicker coffin is buried beside the 
dead, spirits appear twice a day supporting the 
figure and the mask of the departed. At first 
they find it necessary to brush much grave dust 
from his person, and to give the poor weak crea- 
ture a shoulder to lean on. In the course of four 
or five days, however, he regains his strength, 
walks alone, calls on relatives, and finally retires 
well provided with presents. The spirits appear 
completely covered with grave clothes even to 
the hands and the feet. They speak through a 
reed instrument which gives the voice a kind of 
comb-and-paper quality. The masks betray the 
fact that African spirits enjoy a white com- 
plexion and features not at all negroid. Not 
all of them are so beautifully ornamented, how- 
ever, as this ghost-mask from Liberia. 


[39] 








PIRITUALISM flourishes very like a sport 

in West Africa. It takes the place of base- 
ball among the young bucks. No funeral need 
be staged as a preliminary to raising the dead. 
Companies of youths “make ju-ju” on the slight- 
est impulse, presenting the community with as 
many “maws,” or returning spirits, as there are 
masks and disguises to be had. There is always 
some ectoplasm or other wandering through the 
villages of upper Nigeria, Dahomey, and Togo- 
land receiving what are called gifts from the liv- 
ing relatives. The prevalence of ju-ju making 
in most of Africa, and the profits it produces 
need not argue that it is not a serious and sin- 
cerely moving thing to the young men. The 
mask is still potent in West Africa; Negroes have 
been known to bolt out of a Christmas celebra- 
tion when the missionary came in masquerading 
as Santa Claus. If the jazz dancing and coon 
shouting of a colored musical show works our 
Negroes up to a pitch of excitement, it is not at 
all difficult to see how the business of making 
ju-ju would release their taut spirits in Africa, 
especially after a liberal taking of gin. Some- 
times the mediums materialize the dead in the 
forms of the animals that were their totems. 
Thus this elephant mask with a human face in 
each ear roamed a Congo village, inhabited by a 
restless spirit. 


[42] 








UT of the Congo—slavery and Ku Klux and 
jazz, ivory and dollar-votes and the finest 
masks in the world. An Archipenko in the ashes 
of voodoo, an Epstein in ebony. The jungle 
artists have carved in their false faces a beauty 
they could not find in their own. It is never a 
natural beauty. The eyes and nose and mouth 
are not spaced in realistic terms. There is pro- 
portion, but it is not the proportion of life. The 
Negro mask-maker uses nature only as a scaffold. 
The thing he builds has emotional freedom. Yet 
the imagination of the witch-doctor does not 
carry him off into the bizarreries of the South 
Sea Islands, into elephantine snouts and eyes that 
are giant ears. He has always the solid sense of 
the true sculptor. In Africa we catch the artist 
just before he meets the seducticns of realism, 
just before he discovers the arts of accurate re- 
production and spends all his energies on tech- 
nical display. He has the sense of form and its 
necessary relation to life; but he is still free to 
drive directly at the expression of his emotions. 
He is not trying to imitate man. He is trying to 
imitate God. He reproduces emotions instead of 
people. He is the creative artist, not the fecund 
animal. It is hard to believe that so grave and 
beautiful an image as this from the Slave Coast 
can be concerned with ju-ju and demonology. 
Yet the service of the dead in any form may be 
as real as this beauty. 
[43] 





Latin anv aninayr Alen 
A ea nA 


ALOR, 
AS 





SS 
SAS, 
— 


ANE masks have some curious and oppressive 
sense of the dead made living, the spirit 
given flesh, the god or demon brought into physi- 
cal contact. It does not much matter whether 
the Negro carves a masterpiece of wooden sculp- 
ture or hides in a flapping cylinder of white cot- 
ton ten feet high. The mask is a symbol per se. 
The Negro feels this. He feels the immanence of 
something mystic in the very head itself. He is 
not apt to paint or carve surface symbols into it. 
The Melanesian, working with bark cloth and 
rattan, falls back on decoration for significance. 
Even when he carves in wood, a passion for sym- 
bols pursues him. He ornaments his spirit mask 
with all the devices which add meaning to 
painted cloth. The Negro may make a masking- 
suit of cotton, and give his grandfather’s spirit 
the general appearance of a headless giraffe; but 
he prefers to carve a vision of his meaning into a 
solidly sculptured head. The Melanesian wan- 
ders off into eccentric detail. He is like a white 
man with a pencil filling a blotter with vague 
patterns rooted in unconscious ideas. Here, for 
instance, is a towering mask from New Britain 
which has proliferated from a face of leaves into 
a headdress seven feet wide that seems half bird 
and half umbrella. From the little carved figure 
at the top to the last painting on the wings it 
luxuriates in symbols that not even its maker 
can penetrate. 
[45] 








ae HE skull of a dead man is naturally a most 

significant object to his survivors. Many 
tribes, from Ecuador to Borneo, preserve the 
heads of their enemies as trophies. In New 
Guinea and on the islands of Torres Strait, north 
of Australia, the skull of the dead is severed from 
the body, and preserved in the house, much like 
the coffin plate in New England. It is in this 
skull that the spirit of the dead man resides when 
it is not roaming up and down the world. The 
natives of the neighboring island of New Britain 
push this idea to its magical conclusion by mak- 
ing a mask of the front of the skull. The essence 
and the power of dead medicine men and warrior 
chiefs are preserved in this fashion, while the 
skulls of even women and children are often 
found as masks. The nose is built up with clay, 
and hair and color are added. A stick runs from 
ear to ear for the living man to grasp in his teeth 
as he dances twice a year by. moonlight. The 
Aztecs had a similar practice, and this skull mask 
is one of those that the Spanish conquerors 
brought back from Mexico four centuries ago. 
Like the wooden masks of the Aztecs, it is inlaid 
with turquois mosaic, and also, in this case, with 
lignite in alternate bands. The eyes are pyrites. 
If the nose was built up it has fallen away. At 
the back are holes for thongs. 


[47] 








E aman may wear a mask, why nota god? Or, 
rather, if a mask can bring godhead to a man, 
will it not do something quite extraordinary for 
an idol? After all, primitive man makes little 
distinction between a powerful living priest and 
a powerful dead one—which is all a god amounts 
to at the beginning. If a mask is to be hung on 
an idol instead of on a dancing man, lightness 
gives way to durability as the desirable quality. 
Hence, beside the mosaic masks of the temples 
of old Mexico we must place such maskoids as 
this green stone carving from Guatemala. Simi- 
lar masks of terra cotta, jasper, and jadeite have 
been found in Central America, curious shell 
masks in the monuments of the mound builders 
of the Mississippi valley, and true maskoids with- 
out eyeholes upon the trails of the Delawares 
farther east. When such a false face as this 
hung upon an idol, the god lived. Today in India 
certain Jain idols cannot see until small eye- 
masks, with precious stones for pupils, are placed 
upon them. When the Aztec king fell ill, masks 
were hung on the idols of the gods until he re- 
covered or died. A public disaster required simi- 
lar treatment. These masks were highly valued. 
When Columbus landed, such faces were among 
the gifts he received. Cortes, whose coming was 
taken to be the return of the old culture-hero and 
god, Quetzalcoatl, was welcomed with holy ob- 
jects including masks - i gods. 
49 








Fa ECAUSE of the serpent’s mouth in which 
the face appears, this mosaic from ancient 
Mexico may be a mask of the old Toltec god 
Quetzalcoatl. Like most gods, he had once 
been a living chief. Legend said he had “gone 
away’ into the east, and out of the east came 
Cortes nicely timed to satisfy a prophecy of the 
Mexican priests. Now it was a custom of early 
man not only to deify his priestly chiefs after 
death, but to see that they were in a proper state 
for deification by murdering them before their 
vigor failed. The chief’s murder was often de- 
scribed more pleasantly as a “going away.” It 
is no great feat of the imagination to presume 
that the skulls of Mexican heroes on the way to 
godhead may have been preserved as magical 
masks much after the fashion popular in New 
Britain. Such a skull mask would be hung in 
front of his statue to animate it, just as the ashes 
of a dead Alaskan chief may be put into an ab- 
dominal hole in his ancestor-post to give it life 
and potency. Later, when such a mask had be- 
come broken, a mosaic substitute like this would 
naturally have been made to replace it. Annually 
the god-king Montezuma appointed a living sub- 
stitute who was worshipped as the god of gods, 
Tezcatlipoca, and killed at the end of the year in 
place of the ruler. These holy substitutes doubt- 
less provided materials for skull masks, since it is 
recorded that the priests danced in their skins. 


[51] 








ROM the idols of old Mexico masking spread 

up and down the Pacific coast of ancient 
America reaching Alaska and Peru, and it jour- 
neyed eastward as far as the pile-dwellings of 
the Florida Indians. And from these same idols 
the mask was borrowed for dances and festivals 
that passed into purely theatrical performances. 
This wall-carving from Yucatan, cut at the 
height of the Mayan civilization in the sixth cen- 
tury, probably represents a masked priest, armed 
with his flint-edged knife, facing the captives 
whose hearts he is to tear out upon the sacrificial 
stone. But what is the little figure, curiously like 
a dancer, which he holds with his left hand? It 
reminds one that drama in blank verse flourished 
under the Incas, and that the first Spaniards in 
Mexico found bizarre theatrical performances 
going on in the public squares and upon the steps 
of temples. Sahagun, the Spanish priest whose 
curiosity preserved some record of the early 
ways, wrote of “the finery the lords used in their 
dances . . . masks worked in mosaics, and hav- 
ing false hair such as they now use, and some 
plumes of gold coming out of the masks.” Bras- 
seur de Bourbourg, reconstructing Aztec life 
from old records, writes of theatrical perform- 
ances in which there were spoken comedy scenes, 
and actors were masked as beetles, toads, birds, 
and butterflies, and also as mythological figures. 


[53] 








dB HE mask is as full of mysteries and terrors 
as fetishism itself. The greatest, the sim- 
plest, and the grimmest is the grip of fear in 
which the mask holds even the most enlightened 
of men. George W. Babbitt, master of phono- 
graph and radio, looks with a certain disquietude 
upon a mask. What is happening behind the 
wall of grotesque features? Back of a mask man 
becomes inaccessible. His eyes and his mouth 
cease to betray him. The sensitive jelly of his 
face is no longer exposed to rude and galling 
estimate. He is suddenly free of self, hesitant, 
weak, or blustering. He loses his fears, his em- 
barrassments, his responsibilities. What will 
this thing do? The white man wonders. The 
child — savage at heart — flies before it. And 
there, in the frightening of children, one of the 
legends of the Congo finds the origin of the mask, 
crediting its invention to a queen with a little 
daughter who followed her mother to the spring 
each day in spite of threats and punishments, 
until the desperate woman painted a horrid face 
on the bottom of her water gourd. All times, all 
races know the bogey, and most of them have 
masks for it. —The Romans, the Delawares, the 
Eskimo, the Zuni, the Bushongo, and the Papu- 
ans all say: Spare the mask, and spoil the child. 
These wooden masks from southwest New Brit- 
ain are fearsome enough to become the turning 
point in the life of ay es boy or girl. 
55 





AY By 
A <i 





AV OMEN and criminals are classed together 
by primitive man as people who, like 
children, may be kept in order by a vigorous 
application of the mask. Towering false faces, 
screaming giants on stilts, leaf-clad creatures 
with a black cloth for a visor, help to keep Negro 
wives in order. Mumbo-Jumbo hears a whisper 
of domestic friction, and comes screeching out of 
the woods to inspect the women of the village. 
By some uncanny sense, Mumbo-Jumbo picks the 
termagant out of the line-up, and strips and beats 
her. Peace reigns. In the Congo justice mas- 
querades Ku Klux fashion. Tradition tells of a 
king who grew old and feeble, and of a young 
marauder who defied punishment. The king 
took thought, gathered a company of husky 
henchmen, provided them all with identical 
masks to hide them from the vengeance of the 
marauder or his friends, and sent them out to do 
justice. Today justice is made by white men, and 
the secret society of the Babende which grew out 
of the king’s maskers, devotes itself to dances 
and initiations. But somewhere in the Congo 
such a mask as this black thing of carven wood 
may be sitting in mystical judgment on criminals 
brought into its presence for sentence. 


[57] 








WAV primitive man wants to uplift the 
morals of his fellows he hides behind a 
mask instead of a certificate of incorporation. 
In the islands north of New Guinea the Duk- 
Duk finds it necessary to appear once a month 
and discipline his crinkly-haired flock. Some- 
times there is one Duk-Duk; sometimes there 
are two. At certain places they come out of the 
dawn dancing upon canoes that have been lashed 
together; at others they rush out of the brush. 
Huge of stature, with faces five feet high, and 
body-dresses of leaves, these ungainly creatures 
supervise feasts and initiations when they are 
not engaged on the business of morals. For it 
is a business, there as elsewhere. A native who 
feels aggrieved by the actions of some tribesman 
presents shell-money—as well as his case—to 
the Duk-Duk. Policeman, judge, and execu- 
tioner, the Duk-Duk visits the dwelling of the 
accused, demands justice, and, if the reply is not 
satisfactory, burns or breaks down the house. 
The cult of the Duk-Duk takes other forms, re- 
ligious and medicinal, in these eastern islands; 
but graft mingles ever with the high moral tone 
of the proceedings, while in certain sections 
these offshoots of the sacred cassowary—Duk- 
Duk and his wife Tiburan—have become stroll- 
ing players. Doubtless the masks of these 
comedians are ornamented with a more jocund 
face than this monstrosity from New Guinea, 


[59] 








F all masked gods the strangest and most 
engaging is that kindly, grotesque creation 
of the Delaware Indians which goes by the name 
of Misinghalikun—the Living Solid Face. When 
Egyptian priests appeared, as Apuleius pictured 
them, masked as Isis or Horus, they represented 
a deity that had his proper human form as well 
as his disguise as an animal. But the Living 
Solid Face is what it says it is—a mask, a living 
mask. When the Indians first saw Misinghali- 
kun riding a buck, and herding the deer, it was 
simply a fur-clad figure with a wooden face, the 
right half red, the left black. Following a dis- 
aster, the Living Solid Face taught the Dela- 
wares to make a mask like his, and promised that 
when they wore it his spirit would go into it. 
Every year Misinghalikun appears at the cere- 
monies of the tribe, and on the third day sees 
them off upon a hunt; the twelfth night he dances 
in the Big House, where his face is carved upon 
twelve pillars. His mask, his black bearskin 
clothes, his turtle rattle, and his stick are kept by 
a family that burns tobacco before it now and 
then. The Living Solid Face is a bit of a moral- 
ist at the Big House meeting, and, when a parent 
finds his child weak, sick, or disobedient, Mising- 
halikun is ready to attend. But his main func- 
tion is general beneficent guidance over the tribe 
and the hunt. There is no demon here. 


[61] 








N ingenious theory makes the war shield the 
ancestor of the mask. The warrior, holding 
his leathern or wooden buckler in front of his 
face, found it convenient to have eyeholes in it in 
order to see his enemy. Then he found it still 
more convenient to tie his shield onto his head 
with a thong and fight a hand-to-hand battle in 
blinders. The truth is more likely to be that 
primitive man, observing the fear a mask pro- 
duced in his friends, began by painting a mask 
on his shield, and then went as far as he dared in 
disguising his own face with horror. Paint was 
the first war mask, and it is still the most popular. 
It weighs little. It doesn’t restrict the vision. 
The result of a painstaking application of colored 
earths to the face is often fearsome indeed. 
Simply because war masks are dangerous to the 
wearer, their actual use in battle is rare compared 
with their employment in war dances and in reli- 
gious and ceremonial rites. If a man is fully 
armored or mounted upon a horse and safe from 
attack by foot—a later development in conflict 
reserved to the medizval knights of Europe and 
Japan—the face mask and helmet are common. 
Crusaders wore strange, afrighting faces upon 
their visors. The Japanese hammered such 
demon-grins as this out of iron. They also made 
half-masks ornamented with an almost kaiser- 
lich mustache of horsehair. 


[63] 








Za E 
we VE SKS 
L GZ «yy, 
BR Ne : Ni > y 
S AM ans 
WZ eh ( ~rd= Ti 
« © “or SAS 
rma - Y y ee - ££ o& 














fers it was the difficulty of doing busi- 
ness with an enemy at close quarters in a 
mask provided with only one pair of eyeholes 
that led the Africans to design a helmet with two 
faces. Or perhaps, like all aborigines, they 
counted most on the fear-inspiring nature of the 
carven mask, and thought it wise to have a face 
to work in retreat as well as one for the charge. 
Since a fearsome magic, rather than physical pro- 
tection, is the virtue of the war mask, it is not 
unnatural that in New Britain masks are some- 
times made from the skulls of departed chiefs in 
order that their spirits. may lead the tribe into 
battle and dismay their enemies. The primitive 
inhabitants of the New World found an efficient 
way to use the power-giving mask of a totem- 
animal without permitting the enemy to take 
advantage of low visibility. In the armies of 
Montezuma the Spaniards observed a kind of 
helmet-mask overshadowing and protecting the 
face. The Aztec soldier looked out from the 
mouth of a puma, a mountain lion, or a wolf, 
wearing the hide much as Hercules—along with 
other Greeks no doubt—wore the famous lion’s 
skin. In Alaska the Tlinkit Indians still pre- 
serve a kind of wooden helmet which seems to 
be a relic of a war mask grown too embarrass- 
ing to the vision, and pushed up on top of the 
head. This specimen was doubtless painted as 
well as carved. 
[65] 








TD ADeNG is speech to primitive man. He 
prays, teaches, threatens, and brags with 
his body. Before the battle he dances a war 
dance to heat the blood and to work a piece of 
disastrous magic on the enemy. Even when he 
is face to face with the foe, a little dancing is 
often in order. Roland’s trouvére stepped out 
before the Frankish army to slang the troops of 
Islam, and to brag of the valor of his lord; but in 
Java they say it with dancing. Before a conflict 
two gorgeously robed figures, often crowned 
with masks, were wont to step out between the 
rival armies and execute a song and dance re- 
flecting the glories of their arms. The mask of 
brag is naturally a most important feature of the 
potlatch of British Columbian Indians, a feast at 
which a chief demonstrates his wealth by giving 
away his riches. Here is one mask of four used 
at such a celebration to represent rival chiefs, 
who may have looked on during the uncompli- 
mentary proceedings. Half of the face of one of 
these. red, white, and black masks was supposed 
to have been burned away by the extraordinary 
heat when the boasting chief was burning up 
some of his valuable property. It is easy to ima- 
gine that, though a ceremony of this kind did not 
begin as a war dance, it might readily end in one. 


[67] 








| ee peace mask is an ingenious invention of 
the natives of New Ireland. It is diaboli- 
cally martial. Upon the first of each May tribes 
that have been deadly enemies for the past twelve 
months meet and feast and dance together. Con- 
siderable preparations precede the love-feast. In 
the time available from tracking and murdering 
one another during the fifty-two weeks of active 
warfare between gatherings, the warriors make 
themselves masks of as varied and terrible a 
nature as their genius commands. On the morn- 
ing of the feast, dressed in red shirts and skirts 
of ferns, the masked tribesmen paddle to the 
scene of the feast blowing on conch shells and 
pounding tom-toms. The day is pleasantly di- 
vided between dancing and eating. Enemies sit 
down to dinner side by side with no more than a 
passing thought for the possibilities of poison. 
Peace reigns till evening. Then, perhaps, some- 
one laughs at a mask. And soon there is suff- 
cient casus belli to last the next year through. 
This mask of painted bark cloth is from the 
neighboring island of New Guinea, but in what 
one might call its freedom of execution and its 
wealth of decorative illusion it is probably very 
like a peace mask of New Ireland. 


[69] 





© ° 


\, 
Po ss 





Hok twenty centuries and more, the mask 
rioted through Europe in licentious carni- 
val. Far behind the Fétes of the Kalends, far be- 
hind the Saturnalia and the Hilaria, pagan peas- 
ants revelled in false faces at the seasonal festi- 
vals of planting and harvest. Rome and all her 
empire, from Spain to the forests of Germany, 
and from Asia Minor to Britain, drank and 
masked, loved and worshipped, in celebrations 
that have come down to us in the festivities of 
Christmas and Mardi Gras. Holy Church 
frowned and forbade, but had to end in giving 
the pagan rites a decent name. Christ’s birthday 
sanctified one, the coming of Lent excused the 
other. Even the clergy masked. At the Feast 
of Fools, which replaced the Kalends, the lesser 
churchmen turned their vestments inside out and 
held in the very church itself the jocund rites of 
the Boy Bishop, the Lord of Misrule, the Pope of 
Unreason. In 1207 Innocent III forbade the 
clergy to wear masks. But holy pronouncement 
availed nothing. The medizval miracle plays, 
with their demons and dragons, had fed the 
flame of mimicry, and when the mask was 
driven out of the church at last in the fifteenth 
century, it luxuriated in the carnivals that have 
persisted to our own day in Rome and Venice, 
Paris and New Orleans. Under the shadow of 
the Alps and within ten miles of Oberammergau, 
peasants still wear Saige masks as this. 
[71 








Ea the little valley of Lotschental, which lies 
half way between the Matterhorn and the 
Jungfrau, Swiss peasants have held revels which 
carry us back through the whole history of the 
mask. They bring us memories of Walpurgis- 
nacht and of the Kalends, of child-scaring and 
neighbor-robbing under the protection of the 
false face, of feasts to banish demons and make 
nature fruitful. Three days before Lent the 
chimneys are cleaned, and the demons come 
forth. Doors are locked and only mature men 
venture out. Wearing special vestments, with 
their clothes turned inside out, and their faces 
covered with the masks of men and animals and 
demons, the unmarried men—some disguised as 
women—career through the villages. They 
strike and besmooch passers-by with bags of 
ashes. They bellow like bulls and burst into the 
houses, frightening girls even as they drive out 
counter-demons and cure such ills as barrenness. 
Tradition has it that these masks were used by 
robber bands, secret societies like the masked 
fraternities of Africa. This dragon’s head with 
its moveable jaw comes from the neighboring 
Tyrol, and is typical enough of the eccentric 
masks of the Alpine people. It recalls the folk- 
festivals of St. George which must have pained 
good Queen Victoria as late as 1876. 


[73] 








fe CY LUS preserved in one of his plays a 
relic of the earliest rituals of Greece, the 
masked figure who is half horse and half rooster. 
And in the carnivals of Pinzgau and Pongau in 
the Austrian Tyrol, a descendant of the curious 
and classic beast appears in this antlered deer 
with the beak of a bird. This mask represents 
a Perchten—one of the “echt” Perchten, in fact. 
Twelve of these demons—old as time—appear in 
the procession of fifty or sixty young men who 
pass through the villages on the first Sunday 
after Twelfth Night masked as dragons, devils, 
and all manner of monstrosities, human and bes- 
tial. They riot down the streets, striking with 
whips, cow tails, and other phallic switches, the 
women that line the way. Young wives, anxious 
for offspring, gaze upon the potent symbols of 
fecundity depicted cn the masks. From such 
ancient festivals, demoniacal and comic, devel- 
oped that masking madness which spread down 
Italy, and carried disguises through carnivals 
that lasted six months. In the eighteenth cen- 
tury, from October to Christmas, from Twelfth 
Night to Lent, and indeed on the slightest pretext 
thereafter, people went about grotesquely dis- 
guised. Ina scrap of a half-mask or elaborately 
helmeted, they shopped and called and danced, 
invaded church and palace, did business and 
pressed law suits. Under the mask all was 
democracy and license. 


[75] 








MONG savage peoples the boy goes to 
school when he becomes a man. Until 
puberty he is classed and treated as a woman. 
Puberty brings initiation into manhood and into 
secret societies at the same time. Initiation is a 
time for learning secrets, secrets of men and gods, 
Some of these secrets are told by word of mouth, 
some are taught visually. By means of little 
dramas which show what not to do, the bushmen 
of Australia teach adolescents the rules of life 
provided by the gods. Everywhere there is some 
test of bravery in the ceremonies, some element 
of the terrifying. The boys of New Guinea, who 
go about during all the time of initiation dressed 
in a special costume and mask, are made to walk 
into the mouth of a whale-like monster, which is 
a hut disguised. Mothers and sister mourn until 
the monster spews them up. Or sometimes they 
are sent out into the woods to meet and talk with 
such a demon-god as this mask from the Fly 
River. At this time they learn that the gods 
they have seen were only masked men—though 
men animated for the moment with the spirit of 
the gods—and they swear to keep the secret from 
the women and the children. Connected with 
every initiation is a great mass of legend, told, 
sung, or acted out. From such legends comes 
the drama of civilized times. 


[77] 








OMPARED with the other Indians of the 
southwest, the Apache is poorly supplied 
with gods and legends. Yet the medicine men 
and dancers who would take part in their cere- 
monials must know some fifty songs with the 
accompanying dances and pantomime, and must 
know them in the proper order. In contrast to 
the huge pantheon of the Pueblo Indians, the 
Apache have only four gods of their own. These 
are the Gans, and they make their appearance at 
very important ceremonies held in a time of war 
or pestilence, and at a frequent and very odd 
puberty rite—a kind of initiation for girls. The 
four Gans—each of a different color and dedi- 
cated to a different quarter of the earth—origi- 
nally dwelt with man. They grew fearful, how- 
ever, when they saw death about them, and de- 
cided to depart. Not wishing to leave men alone, 
the head god hid one of his little daughter’s play- 
things, and while the child was searching for it, 
the Gans escaped. For a time these gods re- 
turned at stated intervals, and when they re- 
turned no more, the descendants of the girl and 
her Indian husband learned to make masks of 
the Gans, and to dance their dances from sunset 
to dawn. The mask itself is a shapeless bag with 
three holes, at first made of deerskin but now of 
cotton. Above the mask is a pattern of painted 
sticks made from the Spanish bayonet. A clown 
without a mask accompanies the Gans. 
[79] 








mene 
uk SEAS 
Ny es WWE 


(| eee tribal legends of primitive man lead 
backward into buried history as well as for- 
ward into the theatre. Some race-memory of a 
terrible man-eating chieftain is doubtless pre- 
served in the Great Cannibal Spirit of the 
Kwakiutl Indians of British Columbia. Today 
he protects the Hamatsa secret society. The 
candidate for initiation disappears into the forest 
in summer to meet the Great Cannibal Spirit, and 
to learn the songs and rites of the order. At the 
time of the winter ceremonies the Great Cannibal 
Spirit dances the earthquake dance in the house 
of Hamatsa to bring back the initiate. The front 
of this house is painted to represent a raven, and 
it is through the open mouth of the bird that the 
candidate enters, much as the boys of New 
Guinea enter the whale-house of their society. 
The hint of death and rebirth in this initiation is 
elaborated in many Indian and Eskimo cere- 
monies having to do with those twin offshoots of 
the totem—the clan and the secret society. In 
one case, for example, the candidate is most real- 
istically killed. The women wail over a decapi- 
tated dummy. There is a funeral, a banquet, a 
burial. It is not till a year later that the initiate 
reappears, brought back by a man masked as a 
totem animal. 


[8r] 








HE mind of the North Pacific Indian is 

astonishingly fertile in dramatic legend and 
in methods for embodying these stories in 
masked beings. The initiate of the Hamatsa 
secret society, becoming the slave of the Great 
Cannibal Spirit who protects the lodge, dances 
four times about the room disguised in this 
bird-head and costume, snapping his three-foot 
wooden jaws at everyone in the house. In this 
initiation the Kwakiutl Indians make use of 
many stage properties of wood, including light- 
ning sticks and serpents made with moveable 
joints much like the Japanese toys. 


[83] 








Pee bleak northern winter, empty of activity, 
which leaves our farmers immured with the 
Sears, Roebuck catalog, turns the Indians and 
the Eskimo of the North Pacific coast towards 
the most fantastic play with wooden masks and 
the dramatization of legends. Summer is the 
time for the potlatch—great feast and giving 
away of property in a gesture of braggadocio. 
Early in winter, before the secret societies hold 
their initiations, the clans recount their legends 
in long dramatic sequences. From Vancouver 
Island to the Aleutians at the iarthest tip of 
Alaska, Indians and Eskimo are carving, paint- 
ing, and using masks such as this of Dsonoquoa, 
the Black Man. Although some of the masks in 
wood and copper bear a striking resemblance to 
the work of the Japanese, and are used by Es- 
kimo upon islands stretching close to Asia, the 
fact that the eastern Eskimo are without false 
faces argues that masks were borrowed originally 
from the Indians to the south, who in turn prob- 
ably got them by easy stages from Mexico and 
Peru. The religion of these northern tribes, un- 
usually rich in totems, coupled with the leisure 
of long winters, has produced an elaboration in 
the use of masks not to be found elsewhere in 
the world. 


[85] 








HE rich rivers of the North Pacific enable 

the Indians to maintain a fixed abode, and 
to advance to the cultural level of an agricultural 
people while still remaining hunters of animals. 
The result is a remarkable mass of totemic leg- 
ends, elaborate dramatic ceremonies, and the 
most complicated use of masks. The hunting 
man conceives animals as.gods and gods as ani- 
mals. He believes that great spirits take animal 
shapes. He sends his own spirit into animals for 
safe-keeping. Small wonder the North Pacific 
Indian thinks that an animal has two shapes— 
one his own, and the other a god or a man— 
and that all the beast has to do is to shove up his 
snout with his paw to show the human face be- 
neath. Hence the Indian makes masks which can 
be god, animal, or man at the will of the dancer. 
His mask acts out a whole legend by itself. 
Here, of instance, is a mask of the first dawn. 
Outside, when the black wings are closed, is 
Night. The dancer pulls a string, the wings 
open, and the red, beaked sun appears. He pulls 
_ another string, the sun-mask rises on little iron 
rods, to reveal underneath it the face of the 
being who makes the light, all white. Above the 
sunrise mask is a device for scattering feather 
down to represent mist or fog. : 


[87] 


prvieennenees 


Y 





Sy 
SS 


Zs Sy 


a Wo 





ae Great Spirit took the form of a bird, flew 
down to earth, and became a human being. 
Man at his most primitive would chant such a 
story at the proper point in a ritualistic cere- 
mony. A little more advanced, he might sym- 
bolize the legend through a number of men and 
masks. The North Pacific Indian creates, in- 
stead, a single mask by which a dancer can act 
out the whole story. This mask from British 
Columbia may well have told such a story. On 
the outside is some great round shape, perhaps 
a painted and carved head of deity. Within— 
pulled back now against the outer shape by a set 
of strings—are a bird’s head and beak. In the 
centre on a third mask appears a human face. 
When a man thus dramatizes a legend he is on 
the way toward pure theatre. And, indeed, the 
Indians and the Eskimo of the northwest seem 
to derive quite as much pleasure as they do reli- 
gious satisfaction from their ceremonies. They 
are always elaborating old dramas and staging 
new ones. A traveler records fifty-three cere- 
monies on Vancouver Island, enacted by twenty 
to thirty men, women, and children. The use of 
the mask with these people ranges all the way 
from elaborate mechanical tricks and illusions 
of murder, fire, and decapitation, to little finger 
masks for the women to wear on certain cere- 
monial occasions. 


[89] 








UNTING man—the savage—makes masks 

of animals to increase by magical ritual the 
food on which he lives. Farming man—the bar- 
barian—thinks only of rain, and works his magic 
by pouring water down from a treetop or show- 
ing the gods in some such way what it is he 
wants. He reserves masks for initiations, the 
raising of spirits, and the punishment of the 
wicked. In America, however, down in the 
desert lands of the southwest, where mesas jut 
up out of the golden waste like castles in a dawn, 
live farmers who have evolved a most extraor- 
dinary cult of masked gods to act out rain cere- 
monies which are almost dramas. These are the 
Zuni, Hopi, and Keres Indians, who live in those 
strange and mesa-like dwellings of rooms piled 
on rooms, the ancient pueblos in which we see 
the ancestor of the American apartment house. 
Here in the masked spirits—the Kachinas of the 
Hopi and the Kokos of the Zunhi—we find an- 
cestor worship and god-making in clearest be- 
ginnings, the dead hero turning into deity, the 
holy man into a saint. The masks of these gods 
are as symbolic as the dances and the legends of 
their drama. The stiff leather is decorated with 
symbols rather than features. Here is the Zufi 
mask of Anahcho, for instance, with a hand 
painted in black across the face to represent a 
constellation, and with a flower of the narcotic 
jimpson weed for an ear. 


[or] 








HE religion of the Pueblo Indians is as ac- 
quisitive as the next man’s. The tribes bor- 
row deities and dances from one another. Their 
gods are very like Catholic saints; sometimes 
their ceremonies corrupt Catholic ritual, and 
sometimes they are corrupted by it. There are 
queer old war god idols that lurk out in the hills. 
The stars take human shape upon fetishes. Ani- 
mal and vegetable spirits appear as masked men. 
But the bulk of Pueblo religion is symbolic 
legend, acted out by the ancestor gods who inter- 
cede between man and the Great Spirit—the He- 
She of the Zuni, visible as the blue vault of the 
sky—and his Rain Makers. At the head of the 
Zuni Kokos are the nine members of the Council 
of the Gods, the four towering Shalakos—giant 
couriers of the Rain Makers—and the ten mud- 
head clowns, the Koyemshi. This black and 
white mask with its long blue horn represents 
Siatasha, the Rain Priest of the North. The 
Kokos go through ceremonies that range from 
marching, singing, and dancing, through sym- 
bolic action and dialog, and the display of mario- 
nette-like devices, to burlesque and something 
very like pure theatre. The purpose of the cere- 
monies is usually rain-making, sometimes the 
propitiation of ghosts, and sometimes purifica- 
tion. They are all based upon legends and they 
serve the purposes of initiation and pure enter- 
tainment. 
[93] 








ACH mask of the Pueblo Indians is used 
many times in many ceremonies. Its 
leather base is repainted and redecorated again 
and again each year to represent different gods 
and goddesses. These masks are of five shapes. 
Two varieties cover the whole head, one with a 
smooth, hard, dome-like helmet, the other with 
a shapeless cloth bag. Three others are simply 
visors like this. The visor may extend only as 
far as the chin; it may round under the chin, or 
it may hide the chin with a fringe of black hair. 
Oddly enough, if the mask has a beard, it usually 
means that the god is a goddess. In the case of 
this false face the statement is literally true. 
For the Zuni mask of this design belongs to a 
god who was dressed as a woman to make him 
a more docile captive. It figures in a quarterly 
ceremony to propitiate the spirits of a legendary 
tribe annihilated by the Zuni after it had cap- 
tured a number of their ancestral gods. The 
ceremony shows the enemy tribe and its cap- 
tives. As masks are not only repainted, but the 
gods themselves appear in many different cere- 
monies, this deity may be found among the Hopi 
taking part in rain dances. 


[95] 








N 

ANY objects besides masks are necessary 

to Pueblo ceremonies. There are sand 
paintings, fetishes in the ceremonial rooms, corn 
meal and pollen to be scattered about, bull 
roarers and gourd horns, dolls duplicating the 
masked gods, and lightning sticks like Jacob’s 
ladder. Tablets, feathers, and bits of painted 
wood are often added to the mask. The helmet 
of this Hopi mask is supplemented with devices 
painted and cut to represent rain, thunder, 
clouds, lightning, and growing corn. Naturally 
it is potent in the ceremonies designed to liven 
the alluvial desert into fertility. The Pueblos 
seem little concerned with the fertility of man 
or beast—having noticed, perhaps, that this is 
apt to take care of itselfi—and the only god who 
wears a phallus is wholly absorbed in rain 
making. The Hopi dead, when they become 
Kachinas, intercede with the Rain Makers. The 
Zuni dead collect water in gourds and pots which 
the Rain Makers pour upon the earth from the 
protection of cloud masks. The Kachinas—the 
dead and deified ancestors themselves—used to 
come down to live with the Hopi from the 
winter solstice to the summer solstice. When 
they could do so no longer, they taught the 
people how to make masks into which their 
spirits could go. ‘These masks are now first 
worn at the late December ceremony called the 
Return of the Kachinas, and put away with the 
departure of the antes at the end of June. 

97 








HEN the roots of Elizabethan drama 

were forming in the mystery plays, 
guilds of actors, each in charge of an episode in 
a story of the apostles or the saints, passed 
from square to square until all the town had seen 
the completed drama. In the pueblos the re- 
ligious drama of the Indian saints is acted in the 
same way by half a dozen different societies, 
each giving one of six scenes in each of the 
kivas or sacred rooms of the orders. Later 
some of the dances may be repeated on the 
plaza; but in these outdoor performances there 
is never the atmosphere of mystery and theat- 
ricalism that hovers in the stifling air of the 
kiva lit only by a fire which attendants hide 
with blankets while the dancers and the mario- 
nettes take their places. This monstrous mask 
of Wupamau stands by while the plumed ser- 
pent of the great flood, suspended on wires, 
darts his body out of a hole in a sacred tablet, 
and knocks down little clay pedestals and 
sprouts of corn which represent a growing field. 
Here in the mystic clarity of the southwestern 
air dance and dialog, mask and marionette are 
creating the beginnings of religious drama. But 
civilization, corrupting the ritual, seducing its 
servants, and laying the shadow of the Black 
Rock irrigation dam across the ceremonies of 
the Rain, Makers, decrees that these beginnings 
shall also be the end. 

[99] 








IONYSUS, fertilizing earth-spirit of the 

Greeks. Bacchus, his Roman brother, god 
of wine. A deity presiding over the rebirth of 
the fields and forests each spring, uniting fecun- 
dity and drunkenness, religion and drama... 
This mask might be the effort of some rude but 
expressive peasant of the Mediterranean to 
weave the fibers of the harvest into a portrait 
of the god with vine leaves in his hair. At cer- 
tain places in America, Indians have masked in 
a fashion that carries us back to Greece and the 
birth of the drama. Something of the clown, 
something of the demon, and something of the 
earth-god are to be found in all spirit-emblems 
of fertility invented by man to give him courage 
in the face of the death of vegetation every fall. 
These things are here in this corn husk mask of 
the Iroquois. As a prelude to the purifying 
offices of the False Face Company, these wind- 
borne spirits who guard the growth of vegeta- 
tion rush in and out of the ceremonial lodge be- 
fore their brothers appear, carrying implements 
of husbandry in their hands. Significantly, the 
healing rites of the Husk Faces are accomplished, 
not with the ashes of the False Faces, but with 
water. 


[ror] 





SSS 
x 
> 


NS 
IN 
N 





NA EN the clown invades demonology and 
a comic mask mocks. at the dread solem- 
nities of the spirit-world, primitive man is fairly 
well along toward that great liberation of the 
spirit which speaks out in drama. It is hard to 
claim as much for such a clown as this fibre 
mask from the Amazon with the diamonds of 
Harlequin upon it; for we know little of the 
rites of these South American Indians, and. less 
about this particular false face with its cov- 
ering for head, body, and even hands. We do 
know, however, in the bacchanalia with which 
these people propitiate the demon Jurupari, 
there are not only mythical figures, giants, 
naked men with horrible faces, and men dis- 
guised as oxen, deer, cranes, and jaguars, but 
also daring jesters. And we know that in north- 
western Brazil the savages have masked cere- 
monies which have worked over into little less 
than pure theatre. Defiance of the demon-world, 
and assertion of man’s own godhead come in 
with the clown. The ritualistic meaning of the 
masked rite begins to fade, and the sport of imi- 
tation and of story-telling gain upon actor and 
audience alike. 


[103] 








WO HALLIC and fertilizing, outrageous and di- 
vine, roared over and revered, clowns play 
a part in every masked ceremonial of the south- 
western Indians. The ten Koyemshi of the 
Zuni and their counterparts in the other pueblos 
are as earthy as their pet name—the Mud 
Heads—or the clay-loaded bag which makes 
their mask. When they give you corn, you 
must neither eat nor trade it; it must be planted 
as a magic for the crops. When they eat filth 
or make love realistically on the house tops, you 
must see in it nothing more personal that the 
eternal, fruitful processes of nature. But when 
the Mud Heads play games and travesty the 
sacred ceremonies like circus clowns burlesquing 
prohibition, the Ford car, or radio, you may see 
grubby little Man asserting godhead and elbow- 
ing and jostling the demons. The Indians fear 
the Koyemshi—for one thing, they have in the 
knob on each ear and the top of the head the 
footprints of the people scooped up with the dirt 
of the streets. If the Indian begrudges the Mud 
Head food’when he comes begging, some trouble 
is sure to befall the niggard. Yet you may see 
the Zuni praying to a Mud Head. He remains 
the Dionysiac divinity who is making fearsome 
ritual over into the joy and exaltation of drama. 


[105] 





Titi m" TTT TTT 


YTrli11 Mmyiut i ath 
\) 


: : i 





IONYSUS makes drama. Before this god 

of vegetation came to Greece there was 
ritual but no drama. There were masked animal 
dances that stretched far back to primitive 
initiations, and there were chants sung and 
danced at the tombs of dead heroes who had 
become gods. The peculiar and dramatic thing 
about Dionysus was his story of death and re- 
birth. His body had been rent apart, and scat- 
tered like leaves in the fall, and he had been 
reborn as the earth is reborn each spring. When 
the leader of the worshippers in goat-skins, 
dancing and chanting the story of their hero 
before his altar, began to act out the god’s life 
in his own person he had to do something in- 
herently dramatic. He had to leave the circle 
to meet his death in the woods, and he had to 
return to tell of his death and his rebirth. All 
Greek drama retains the distinctive forms of 
the service at Dionysus’ altar—the dancing, 
chanting chorus, the hero who is killed, the 
messenger who tells of his death and rebirth, 
the return of a god. Thespis fused the mimetic 
worship and the ritualistic choruses, and he 
added an actor. They credit him, too, with the 
invention of the mask worn by actors and 
chorus. But the evidence is as slight as the 
supply of masks left from Attic Greece. Today 
we have only such replicas in marble or terra 
cotta as this votive offering in a Roman tomb. 

[107] 








apesets may have invented the mask or 
merely borrowed and improved it. The 
mask was inevitable in Greek religious drama, 
and it held on even into comedy that became 
domestic farce. Spirits that come out of graves 
—not to mention gods—are hardly likely to take 
the forms of villagers. Even in New Guinea a 
man will wear a mask when he is going to raise 
the dead. If he has the sensitive mind of a 
Greek, he will know that a human face is ab- 
surdly inappropriate to a god. To an Athenian 
of the time of Phidias the natural thing was for 
an artist to create the face of Dionysus out of 
wood and leather, cloth and cork and paint, and 
give it appropriate and absolute values. More- 
over, the mask had certain practical advantages. 
It could contain a kind of megaphone to throw 
the voice across the great spaces of the open air 
theatres. It could be made a little larger than 
life in order that 40,000 might see it. With 
many tragic masks to choose from, the three 
actors to whom Greek tragedy was _ limited 
could play many parts in the same play. This 
mask of a courtezan on the later Graeco-Roman 
stage carries us on to the days when the stock 
figures of Latin drama—the glutton, the miser, 
the rascally servant, the young hero—had been 
reanimated into the fixed types of the Commedia 
dell’ Arte of the sixteenth century with their 
half-masks. 
[109 | 





| N 





| Be Japan the mask begins in demonology, and 
ends in the most refined and recondite dra- 
matic form in the world. In the eighth century 
a force of twenty devil-dancers, equipped with 
exceptionally potent masks each containing four 
lozangular eyes, kept the palace free of demons. 
By the fifteenth century the Japanese had de- 
veloped a form of masked religious drama as 
perfect within its own limits as the Greek, and 
presenting surprising parallels to that highest of 
tragic forms. Today the drama of the Greeks is 
a little bundle of manuscripts, and their theatre 
a dubious tradition. Even the ways of Shake- 
speare’s playhouse are difficult to learn. But 
this No drama of Japan exists today as com- 
plete, as pure, as uncorrupted by man and time, 
as when the Shoguns first saw it four centuries 
and a half ago. The masks of the No, clean cut, 
sharply characterized, quite perfect in their sub- 
limation of the realistic, stand close to the top 
of the art of the false face; only the more vigor- 
ous and expressive masks of the Negro excel 
them. Here is a mask used in the religious 
dances of the eleventh century from which No 
sprang. Few of these older masks have reached 
the western world; they are treasured reverently 
in the Buddhist temples and imperial collections. 


[r11] 








FFICIAL religions are thoroughly con- 

fused in Japan. Transmigrational Bud- 
dhism, plentifully encrusted with demoniacal 
and heroic legends, reached Japan in the sixth 
century. In the course of thirteen hundred 
years it has managed to fuse with the mild 
Spiritism and nature worship of the Shinto 
faith of old Japan, just as it fused with the 
ancestor worship of China. The origins of the 
No drama lie in this curious and obscure min- 
gling of religions, and they are as curious, as 
obscure, and as mingled. Two sources are 
Buddhist; one of these is courtly and one re- 
ligious. The Chinese brought to Japan a court 
dance which still persists. In it the actions 
of a hero are dramatized in a series of postures 
against a background of music. The Buddhists 
brought, too, their miracle plays. In the tem- 
ples, to the accompaniment of scriptural read- 
ings, a masked god and a certain number of 
subordinate figures danced holy pantomimes. 
As with our own miracle plays of the middle 
ages, the comic element had a way of squeezing 
itself in, requiring masks which, some authori- 
ties think, may have been remotely derived from 
Greek low comedy. This grotesque mask from 
the twelfth century was one of those used for 
the Gigaku- dance, in which the pantomime of 
Buddhism began to fuse with a more native 
form. 

[113] 








ByeeHA is complacent. Demons, gods, and 
ancestors may cling to his vestments. He 
accepts their attentions as part, perhaps, of the 
discomforts this side of Nirvana. In Japan 
Buddhism found one of the most primitive forms 
of religion, the Shinto worship of nature forces 
and a myriad of beneficent spirits. All Japan 
is dotted with shrines of local deities, kindly 
though mysterious beings that crept out of the 
ancestral forest when fetishism was dying. For 
centuries these spirits have appeared at regular 
intervals to repeat the story of their advent in 
the pantomimic dances of masked priests. Even 
great cities like Tokyo are well supplied with 
such local spirits, and once a year the god climbs 
up on a platform in the street to dance the story 
of his coming. Before the No drama was in- 
vented, dances of this sort were accompanied on 
the lute. The next step was the introduction of 
song. In the Japanese renaissance the nobles 
were already singing together with all the enthu- 
slasm of a German Sangerbund, and soon they 
made verses and music to be sung as an accom- 
paniment to a dance. At the same time the 
Shinto priests introduced songs of the god-spirit 
as they danced the yearly story of its advent. 
Thus was the ground prepared for that rare, 
lovely, and aloof art, the No drama of dance and 
dialog and lyric song. Here is another of the 
Gigaku masks which pti those of the No. 
I15| 








UITE as old a thing as the return of a spirit 
in a mask was the ancient celebration which 
sent to the Shinto temples the actors who were 
needed to make ritual dances into drama. This 
thing was the country festival of spring plant- 
ing and autumn reaping. As everywhere the 
world over, rude comedy arose in these simple 
attempts at generative magic and celebration. 
The end of such buffoonery was another of the 
many forms of the masked dance in Japan—the 
Dengaku or “ricefield music.” Soon there devel- 
oped roving acrobats and jugglers, clowns and 
comedians, who spread the fun of seed time and 
harvest time all round the year. The priests of 
Shinto and Buddha brought these Dengaku 
gamesters into the temples to draw crowds to 
the periodic festivals. These players began to 
devise farces, and ended with the comedy called 
Kiogen. Presently they were trying their hand 
at tragic subjects, the legends of spirits and 
heroes. The god-dancer appeared in their midst, 
sometimes as a spirit, sometimes as a hero. A 
Dengaku troupe was invited to the court of the 
Shogun, and under the stimulus of such patron- 
age arose suddenly from god-dance, country 
farce, and the songs and dances of the court the 
precise and lyric drama called No. Here is the 
mask of a fool, Baka, typical of the country 
farces and the false face clownery still to be seen 
in temple yards and Se ca processions. 
117 








OMETHING besides masks and demons was 

necessary to the making of a dramatic art 
so refined as the Japanese No. This was the 
ancient aristocratic culture of Nippon. Gods, 
Spirits, and heroes can make religious panto- 
mime, but only the critical soul of man can make 
a delicate, mannered, yet austere art-form. The 
No is a group of five or six very short dance- 
dramas given at court or in a special theatre on 
a single day. There is a pattern in each, anda 
pattern in the group. First comes a congratu- 
latory play in which the gods bestow their bless- 
ing; next a battle-piece, a kind of sympathetic 
magic, for the gods and the emperors pacified 
the country by ejecting the demons. After that 
comes a “wig-piece,” or quiet love story; then a 
play of the spirits to signify the passing of this 
transitory life; next a play of an admonitory 
nature, often farcical, and finally another con- 
gratulation. In each verse play there are always 
three chief characters who speak together de- 
veloping some facet of legend. A chorus inter- 
jects comment. At the close the chief character 
dances while music and chorus continue their 
interpretation. The drama of it is spiritually 
intense, the form fragile and precise. The fu- 
sion of dialog, dance, and music is the secret of 
its brief lyric perfection. Here is a No mask, 
grave, austere. ) 


[119] 





|} NS 





IVes* and ritual and legend unite the per- 
fection of Greek tragedy with the perfec- 
tion of the Japanese No. Both dramas are re- 
ligious and both spring out of services com- 
memorating the appearances of gods. Both are 
lyric, as well as dramatic, and both are founded 
upon music and dance. They share the chorus, 
and the human actions and sorrows in both are 
lifted up into a healing understanding by its 
interpretation. Both draw upon heroes and be- 
ings of the spiritual world for people and stories. 
Both put forward a simple ethical lesson. They 
have rich costumes and characterizing masks in 
common. The Greek, like the No drama, was 
given in the open air upon a bare and formalized 
stage. The resemblances are so many that cer- 
tain reckless scholars are tempted to trace these 
features of the No back to Greece via the con- 
quests of Alexander, and the spread of classical 
influences in art across India and China with 
merchants and travelers. Yet essentially No is 
a product of the religion of Japan, and of the 
probity of a race at its highest point of progress. 
Of Greek tragedy and the No it is truer to say 
that both sprang from the common religious 
nature of man, caught up and beatified at a mo- 
ment of exceptional racial exaltation. This old 
man, Sanko, is one of the threé hundred masks 
employed for various parts in the two hundred 
No plays now extant. 


[z21]| 





i NS 





HE masks and the plays, the acting tradi- 

tions and the stage of the No drama have 
come down through four centuries unchanged. 
The plays are acted on a square platform backed 
by a wall on which a pine tree is painted in a 
certain fashion as a symbol of undying strength. 
The wooden floor beneath an overhanging roof 
is made resonant to the feet of the dancers by 
great jars cunningly placed beneath the boards. 
The long “bridge” or wooden walk leading to 
the actors’ room is similarly resonated, and 
along its length are planted three symbolic pines. 
All this has never changed. And so with the 
actors. Whether they appear in unmasked char- 
acters or are hidden behind the faces of old men, 
spirits, or such lovely women as this, they must 
learn their art by a training that has not deviated 
from the time when their forefathers played the 
same parts. The movement of their bodies is 
fixed by diagrams accompanying the written 
texts. The niceties of interpretation are pre- 
served wholly by the training of masters. The 
pose for looking at the double reflection of the 
moon in two tubs is reverently learned with the 
same precision as the movement of the arm 
when the fan serves as teacup, sword, or pen. 
Here in the No, hard on the heels of Greek 
tragedy, the mask finds itself at its highest 
point of perfection in a theatre that unites re- 
ligious ritual and dramatic art. 


[123] 








HEN the mask comes out into public 

entertainment it is in danger. Only the 
exceptional minds of the Greeks and the Japa- 
nese—temperate, contained, yet spirited—have 
been able to make the legend of masked ritual 
into the finest drama. The Chinese have turned 
it into a thesis-play. This drama of the Bud- 
dhist temples of the continent is purely admoni- 
tory. Like the sermons of John Wesley and 
Billy Sunday, it warns you of the consequences 
of sin. Upon stages in the temple yards, the 
priests appear in spectacles that are at the same 
time edifying and amusing. To encourage the 
Chinese to lead virtuous lives, and thus at death 
to travel a step nearer the blessed, permanent 
extinction of Nirvana, the Buddhist and Taoist 
priests depict the judgment after death, and the 
horrors of punishment in the hells of purgatory. 
Gorgeous costumes, masks lovely, horrible, or 
bizarre, and pantomime of a vivid nature unite 
to impress the occasion on the minds of the peo- 
ple. Yet even the most revolting tortures are 
mitigated by a kind of grotesque humor that 
makes the lesson bearable as well as impressive. 
This devil lictor from the seventh court of pur- 
gatory suggests the masked devil of the Euro- 
pean mystery play who popped damned souls 
into hellmouth to the great delight of the 
medieval audience. 


[125] 





De yp - 
op. gam Mp ee Dy ZY) Dy yp” ny YMA, 






f " 
) 
i) Ms 
i) i Z 
Ky 





Uy we 7 
Lawl eo Meh 
1S Chinese have one hundred and twenty- 
eight hells in the ten purgatories through 
which the soul passes from life to life on its way 
to Nirvana. There are hot hells, cold hells, and 
dark hells; hells where those who practice medi- 
cine without a degree and those who refuse to 
ransom grown-up slave girls are rolled out flat on 
a sheet of ice with equal impartiality; hells where 
those who stop funeral processions and those 
who promote litigation join in the pleasures of 
salt pits and brine wells, sit upon spikes, drink 
abominable drugs, or slip and fall upon a path 
of well-oiled beans—all, perhaps, merely to pass 
from the body of a lawyer into that of a coolie or 
even a dog. Yet this charming little girl with 
the quizzical smile upon her mask is among the 
attendants in the First Court of Purgatory. She 
is one of four servants waiting upon the benefi- 
cent Buddhist madonna Kuan-yin, who attends 
the hellish court doubtless to see that justice 
is properly tempered. When the Taoist priests 
act out this scene in their religious and admoni- 
tory drama of the after-world, Kuan-yin sits 
in the centre at the back with her eight merciful 
hands and her many other charms displayed 
against the scenery of the island of P’u-t’o, lit by 
candles on the backs of birds. 


[127] 








i} 
Weg} TORY, as pictured in the Chinese 

admonitory drama, is a place of orderly 
processes and variegated officials. The ten 
‘courts are presided over by kings of impressive 
aspect as well as virtue. They are assisted by 
all manner of functionaries. There is, for ex- 
ample, a person named General Bull in the first 
court. He is the beadle, and his mask presents 
him as a bovine creature, because the bull is 
sacred to Yama, lord of the infernos. To sum- 
mon a culprit or a witness from the other world 
the judge employs a sheriff of human form, be- 
cause the devil-policemen cannot stand the light 
of day. This sheriff is a man who has com- 
mitted suicide with a rope. His tongue hangs 
out in an alarming manner, but on his dunce cap 
are four words assuring those whose virtuous 
actions he sees that they will enjoy good for- 
tune. The judge is provided with two assist- 
ants, a civil officer and a military man. This 
martial mask is as thoroughly adorned with 
symbolic flourishes as the face of any general on 
the popular Chinese stage. The secular theatre, 
which is as moral and almost as admonitory as 
the priestly performances, has substituted make- 
up for mask. The strictest of traditions pre- 
scribe white powder and paint for a perfidious 
statesman, red for an upright man, black for a 
brutal character. Over these ground colors play 
bizarre and brilliant curves. 

[129] 








‘HE official religions of China are even more 
confused than Christianity from Christ to 
Channing and from Gregory to Straton. Con- 
fucianism is a rational ethic which took a little 
ancestor worship out of the past. Taoism is an 
intellectual philosophy heavily decorated with 
the wildest kind of polytheism from demons to 
the distinguished dead. Buddhism started out 
to be a rational and atheistic theory that no 
power but your mind could free you from the 
law of reincarnation—a law that made every 
man his own ancestor and his own god or demon 
—and Buddhism ended by allying itself with 
Taoism and acquiring sky gods, animal gods, 
ancestor gods, fairies, and mythological heroes 
who only just escaped deification. When a 
birthday or a wedding occurs among the best 
families of China, this amazing pantheon pa- 
rades in masks as a prelude to the play which 
usually celebrates such an occasion. These 
deities and heroes have come to congratulate 
the celebrant and to bestow on him long life, 
wealth, and progeny. Among the well-wishers, 
if he is a governor or an emperor, are the 
Twenty-eight Patriarchs, the Dragon Kings of 
the Four Seas associated with the rain-making 
dragon, and the fairies of the hundred flowers, 
the thousand flowers, and the ten thousand 
flowers. This is one of the gods of the Twenty- 
eight Lunar Mansions, an animated constella- 


tion. 
[131] 





{) EY hon pe wis 
ROR han 
Mee 

(acl agUy, 





Pee LORS make the best gods. They are 
human, easily understood and managed. 
Yet at a certain point of intellectual growth man 
stops turning his dead into deities, and makes 
mythological heroes of them instead. Troy 
marked this stage for the Greeks. Most of the 
so-called ancestor worship of China lies this side 
of godhead. In the congratulatory play which 
used to be given upon an emperor’s birthday, 
there were all manner of ancestors present in 
masked form, as well as sky-gods and fairies. 
Twenty-one masks revealed the cast of the 
great mythological romance Fung shen yen i. 
The most interesting character is Kiang Tse-ya. 
He became chief counsellor to the emperor at 
eighty when the ruler found him fishing with a 
straight iron hook out of his goodness of heart. 
Such virtue, so the book says, attracted the fish 
as well as the emperor. How close the good 
man came to being made a god may be seen from 
the fact that the words: “Mr. Kiang is here!” 
written on the door of a house is highly es- 
teemed as a method of frightening away a 
demon. Had he lived a few centuries earlier, he 
would as surely have achieved deification as Yiin 
Siao, the nature goddess of the Three Fairies 
Island. She is charming enough in this mask, 
but her only claim to religious fame seems to be 
that she is the owner of a pair of shears capable 
of cutting gods and men in two. 
[133] 








1 the Rome of Buddhism—the city of Lhassa, 
to which the religion came from India as late 
as Christianity came to Rome from Judea—the 
faith of Gautama is even more corrupted by tales 
of saints and demons than it is in the Taoist 
temples of China. The masks of Tibet reflect 
this. In the lamaseries—those hospices of the 
Tibetan monks which infest the country as 
monasteries infested medieval Europe—there 
are masks which carry us back to the days when 
magic and the medicine man, demons and rain- 
makers held sway without the aid of revealed 
and codified religion. Among such ancient 
masks from western Tibet is this portrait of an 
Indian Brahman with the third eye of wisdom 
in his forehead, as well as masks of a famed 
hermit from that holy land, a Hindu layman, 
Mara, the evil principle, and a dolphin-like sea- 
monster. The presence of such every-day figures 
as a Hindu, a Brahman, and a hermit indicated, 
even centuries ago, the practical, workaday na- 
ture of the Tibetan holy drama. Simple and 
rude in its technique, a mere pantomimic pag- 
eant of a moralistic nature, it is a spectacle 
which proves to the public the practical advan- 
tages of salvation by Lamaism. 


[135] 





{| 


LAK} 
4 


I 


iS 





HE lamas of the Tibetan monasteries are 

monopolists of the holy drama. Yet they 
provide no theatre and no stage, no scenery and 
no dialog to aid in its presentation. The per- 
formances take place in the temple yard. Out- 
cries and interjections are the only sounds heard 
above the tramp of feet, the swish of garments, 
and the row of trumpets, gongs, and cymbals. 
Ghoulish clowns, the Atsara, open and close the 
pantomimes in Lhassa by dashing into the court- 
yard, leaping and whirling and turning hand- 
springs, or subsiding into a slow and mystical 
movement of body, hands, and fingers. They 
are clothed in tight-fitting one-piece suits painted 
with the bones of skeletons, and on their heads 
they wear this grisly mask. Its flesh-colored 
surface, laced with meandering veins of blood, 
suggests a flayed head or a ghastly, fattened 
skull. The pantomime which follows the ap- 
pearance of the Atsara is the story of man’s 
temptation by the forces of evil and his rescue 
through the power of the church. Demons offer 
temptations to a masked man. At first he re- 
sists, then is about to succumb, when, in answer 
to the pleadings of his friends, the lamas and 
the guardian powers intervene, and he turns to- 
wards them. Then follows a merry lambasting 
of the demons, whose clothes are as well stuffed 
as the clubs of the gods. 


[137] 








N Lhassa masked festivals are common. At 

New Year’s there are carnivals. In the third 
month, when holy dishes are emptied, and 
sacred pictures hung up, the lamas provide ad- 
monitory pantomimes. And throughout the 
year in Tibet and in China the temples of 
Lamaistic Buddhism hold solemn processions of 
the masked powers of the faith. At New Year’s 
in Pekin the priests of the Yung-ho-kung temple 
present a varied pantheon to the public gaze. 
There are Red, Black, and Blue Kings, the 
Guardians of the World, each provided with the 
lozangular eye of wisdom in his forehead the 
better to penetrate past, present, and future. 
Like the Heavenly Kings, the Green-blue, Brown, 
and Light-blue Officials have a wreath of skulls 
on their foreheads. Each has ninety-one sons, 
but their only companions in the processions 
are eight generals and twenty-eight kinds of 
demons. This is the mask of one of the sixteen 
Dharmapala, who, like the kings of England, 
are defenders of the faith. Their defensive 
methods are not the same, however, for they 
spy the enemies of Buddha from afar, and appal 
them with a ring of flame. 


[139] 








HINA makes the mask into a moral lesson 

and a horrible example. Asia to the south 
of her turns the false face toward art for art’s 
sake. Through Burmah, Siam, Sumatra, Java, 
and Ceylon—in all of southern Asia where the 
Mohammedan does not bar the graven image— 
the mask has left the service of the temple for 
the service of the theatre. And as the mask goes 
out of the temple, so religion goes out of the 
theatre. The drama is only ‘half legend, the rest 
is contemporary fiction. The mask itself has 
found a careless and neglectful master. Some- 
times it is used in the:plays, sometimes not. The 
twilight of the gods falls upon masks and de- 
mons. The false face does not hold the high 
place it has known in savage New Guinea and 
barbarous Africa and among the Greeks and the 
Japanese. In Siam, for example, not all the 
characters wear masks, and those that wear them 
do not speak. This is the mask of the White 
Demon. 


[141] 








AST and West have met in the Siamese 

theatre and curbed the masks and legends 
of the gods. Before the Europeans came Siam 
knew only masked pantomime, and its stories 
were the stories of gods and Buddhas. Soon 
speaking characters invaded the dumbshow, and 
were lording it over the false faces. Today the 
masked figures in the spoken plays are a memory 
of a faded and shrunken art. The theatre of the 
old days is visible only in some occasional pro- 
duction of a masked and operatic ballet wherein 
monkeys fight with demons and many strange 
and curious things occur. The troupes of actors 
that go up and down the country still carry 
stories from Hindu epics, and tell tales of the 
final life of Buddha or of some earlier incarna- 
tion. But many of their plays are modern love 
_stories—such yarns of maidens beloved by croco- 
diles and elephants as the later literature of 
India delights in. The masks that manage to 
insinuate themselves into this drama are made 
of papier-maché, painted white or green or red, 
and elaborately ornamented with gold. This 
tusked demon is also decorated with a headdress 
on which appear turreted heads and grinning 
faces. Animal gods, deified heroes, hermits, and 
wild people are similarly masked. 


[143] 








HE story of the mask and its theatrical 

cousin, the marionette, is vastly complicated 
in southern Asia by the coming of Moham- 
medanism. The last of the great religions—bent 
on the worship of one sublime god, and the abo- 
lition of fetish—forbade its artists to create 
the form of man, animal, or vegetable. Religion 
progressed; art turned into a kind of geometry. 
The reaction of this upon the mask, image of 
god, and the marionette, image of god and man, 
was disastrous. The actor—image of another; 
image, even, of the mask and the marionette— 
seems to have fallen under the ban. Like the 
mask, he is seldom heard of in strictly Moham- 
medan countries. The result is a most confused 
story of the origins of actor, mask, and mario- 
nette in lands like Java, which are Brahminical 
or Buddhist at heart while nominally Moham- 
medan. This island has shadow puppets bor- 
rowed from China many centuries ago. It has 
marionettes which seem to be of more recent 
origin. And it has actors who appear both 
masked and unmasked. The unmasked actor 
was introduced by an emperor in the eighteenth 
century, but the masked player is as old as the 
shadow puppet. Only the deepest study of the 
land from which this grotesque mask comes 
could show how puppets, masks, and actors de- 
veloped in an attempt to balk the law of Mo- 
hammed, and preserve ancient and fetishistic art. 

[145] 








Bree back in the theatre of the shadow pup- 
pets Java began with a religious drama. 
There were stories out of sacred history, tales 
of demons and gods drawn from the Indian epics 
of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, moved 
to Javanese locales, and mixed with a few leg- 
ends of native deities. Such stories are acted out 
today by the leathern figures which, painted in 
vivid colors and adorned with gold for honor’s 
sake, are moved between a lamp and a sheet on 
which their shadows fall. Some tinge of reli- 
gious feeling still attaches to these flattened 
masks of the gods, for before the performance 
of the Wayang Purwa can begin there must be 
an offering of food and a burning of incense. 
These stories of the puppets have been trans- 
ferred to the stage, where actors appear in such 
disguises as this half-mask of a bird-demon. On 
the white, egg-like skull are markings in delicate 
vermilion. 


[147] 








AVA has shadow puppets which tell the story 
of its epic hero, Panji, as well as puppets 
which cast the shadows of a thousand Buddhas 
across the screen. Such adventures among the 
legends of Java are known as Wayang Gedog, 
and religion takes no heed of them, and burns no 
incense at their nightly sessions. The same epic 
stories, along with the saintly and demoniac 
tales of Buddha and Brahma, are the materials 
of the ordinary puppet stage of Java—the 
Wayang Golek. Those svelt and swarthy crea- 
tures with their almond eyes, long noses, and 
even longer arms move with a curious elegance 
as their master, the Dalang, hidden below, shouts 
their lines, and at the same time manages the 
sticks to which, like the shadow marionettes, 
they are attached instead of to strings. The 
faces, if not the figures, of these puppets are 
duplicated in the theatrical performances of 
actors with masks—the Topeng. Even the 
Dalang is present to speak the play. The masked 
stage might, in fact, be a copy from the puppet 
stage, as the puppets from the shadow-sheet, 
were it not that such masks as this are far older 
in Java than the batik-girt figures of the Wayang 
Golek. Or was the puppet as ancient as the 
mask or the shadow show, and is he only now 
escaping from the ban of Mohammed? 


[149] 








iz 

! Kini N 

LAA y \\ 
Sp aga 4 


AVANESE puppets and Javanese actors, 
whether masked or unmasked, share a varied 
repertory. It includes not only the religious 
legends of Asia, and the native epic of Panji, but 
also a large array of Mohammedan and Malayan 
stories of a most romantic type. Clowns and 
buffoons break the monotony of love-adventures 
and heroic exploits. In the case of the puppets 
—so much more under the control of the Dalang 
who operates them—satiric improvisation and 
plenty of local color are vastly popular. With 
the acted versions of these tales no such liberties 
are possible. The action has to be settled on 
beforehand, and the Dalang can speak only such 
lines as will accord with the movements of his 
players. Like most love stories and melodramas 
of martial adventure, the plays of Java are full 
of stock figures—lovely and elegant heroines, 
handsome heroes, and most despicable villains. 
To capture such a matchless beauty as this lily 
princess, the amorous enemy of the hero is very 
likely to send demons and evil spirits as well as 
battling armies. Which, curiously enough, never 
seem to render his efforts any more successful. 


[151] 








HE masks of the Javanese theatre are ordi- 
narily held in the teeth by means of a strip 
of leather or rattan across the inside. Occasion- 
ally a player leaves his muted world to interrupt 
the Dalang, who is speaking the play unseen; 
and then he takes the mask in his hand, and 
holds it in front of his face while he says his 
line. Music and headdresses are even more es- 
sential to the success of a theatrical production 
in Java than are such masks. The heads of 
kings and princesses are piled high with goodly 
ornament. Rawhide and thin, beaten brass or 
copper, suitably painted, tower above the figures 
of the play. Even a dusky villain like this fellow 
is permitted a headdress of appealing and potent 
beauty. 


[153] 








T first blush the commercial theatre of the 

mask seems confined to Asia. It is only 
there that you find pay-as-you-enter theatres 
where the mask is worn. Yet the principle of 
buying a dramatic pig in a poke is very far from 
the mark of the playhouse run for gain. Even 
in the Orient the commoner way of managing 
popular commercial drama is to pay for the 
entertainment after it is sampled; sometimes the 
strollers take up a collection, sometimes the 
richest land owner pays the bill. Is there much 
difference between this system of contribution 
and the gifts presented to medicine men and 
kings who dance in masks? This mahogany- 
colored face with its white and turban-like head- 
dress may very well be the mask in which some 
ruler of a Negro tribe on the Slave Coast danced 
before his people. There is something theat- 
rical, as well as beautiful, in the sweep of the 
headdress, and there is something theatrical, 
as well as regal, in such a dance. The Negro 
has never reached pure drama, masked or 
unmasked. But he has played the false face 
game with an energy and a brilliance surpassing 
almost all other races. For him—naive and un- 
inquiring, intense yet limited—medicine-dance 
and drama, like mask and justice, can be one. 


[155] 








jae through the islands of the east the mask 
is falling away from high sacramental 
uses into mummery. There is no mind of 
Greek or Japanese to raise it into religious 
drama. And even the Papuans do not seem low 
enough in the mental scale to keep the mask 
pure fetish and resist the temptations of the 
theatre. The white man—especially the white 
doctor—breaks down the power of the fetish a 
little. And, as the terrible spirit of the demon 
goes out of the mask, the spirit of play which 
has always been in it increases. Soon the same 
false face that once housed a god or a devil, a 
dead hero-spirit or a moral rectifier hides the head 
of a dancer. Perhaps by being very amusing he 
manages to keep the perquisites that belonged 
to the owner of the mask when it was a spirit or 
a god, and levied a kind of holy blackmail. 
Then—like the Duk-Duks who were once stern 
disciplinarians—he has become a public enter- 
tainer. The mask is commercialized. This false 
face from New Guinea is two and a half feet 
high. It is made of bark cloth painted red, 
white, and black. It has nothing more sacred 
about it than memories of other and older, fiercer 
dances. 


[157] 








{pee curing of fever by the application of 
masks is a thriving business on the island 
that sends us the bulk of our quinine. But the 
masked actor who sells pleasure in verdant and 
pearl-girt Ceylon is an inconspicuous stroller 
carrying pantomimes and comedies from village 
to village. Many towns depend for their drama 
upon the efforts of just such amateurs as leave 
their work at the end of the day to give America 
its “little theatres.” These Singhalese appear in 
a public square which has been made into a 
theatre surprisingly like an Elizabethan play- 
house. There is a forestage thrusting out a half 
circle into the midst of the audience. At the 
back is a curtained inner stage. An orchestra 
maintains a steady accompaniment to the chant- 
ing of the players. Since labor keeps these ac- 
tors occupied through the day, they are apt to 
be none too conversant with their lines. Hence 
a prompter walks in and out of the action, sup- 
plying dialog whenever it is needed, reminding 
the actors where to “cross” and occasionally 
taking over a part, and reading it from the book. 
These people’s theatres present, night after 
night, week in and week out, those interminable 
epics of India, the Mahabharata and the Rama- 
yana, which delight the playgoers of Java. 
They wear masks of wood painted in bright reds 
and blues against the brown of the eastern skin. 


[159] 








HE masks of the Singhalese actors are as 
strictly conventionalized as those of the 
devil-dancers. The patterns are often ancient, 
and these are seldom varied by the craftsmen 
who reproduce them. Many of them have high 
merit as sculpture, though the crude color de- 
tracts not a little from their beauty. The carv- 
ing of this lovely mask, gaining a classic quality 
from the absence of color, recalls the sculptures 
of Greece as we know them, cleansed by the cen- 
turies from the bright paints of Phidias. Here 
there is still something of the spiritual richness 
of the religious mask, conveyed, perhaps, by the 
details of Hindu temple art. The theatre gains 
thereby. With us the mask must come upon the 
stage shorn of the power of the religious spirit. 
There is still a mystery behind it, but the tower- 
ing terrors of superstition no longer hang over 
it. The mask may be amusingly novel: to us. 
It may bring a grotesque comedy into our re- 
vues, or an aphrodisiac charm. But as a seri- 
ous factor it suffers because mystical religion 
has gone out of our life taking its symbols with 
it. The task of the artist of the theatre may be 
to seek out new symbols—the symbols, perhaps, 
of beauty and pain, of exaltation and pathos— 
and to make us feel them in one of the greatest 
of symbols, the ancient and mysterious mask. | 


[161 | 





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EXORCISM 


a= mask is not to be put aside carelessly. 
There is a ceremony for taking it off as 
well as one for putting iton. If a savage ignores 
the ritual he knows that disaster will follow. 
His spirit will be caught in the heart of the 
carved wood. The god who came into him 
when he wore the fetish will remain in his 
flesh, tortured and torturing. . . . We discarded 
the mask of the Greeks without ceremony. 
Perhaps that accounts for the state of our 
theatre today. ... Yes, there is a way of tak- 
ing off every mask, the mask of knowledge, too. 
But you must find it for yourself. 


[163] 


24 


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| . 








ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 


HIS little book is obviously not the work of 
an authority. If it has any values, they 
may be human or artistic, but they are not scien- 
tific. This is a collection of facts and conjec- 
tures sifted through intelligence that is inter- 
ested in the theatre, and claims no experience in 
ethnology or comparative religions. Indeed this 
appendix is the only part of Masks and Demons 
of which I can claim the authorship. Not only 
for the facts presented in the preceding pages, 
but even for a great part of the inferences drawn, 
I must give extensive credit. 

First of all, of course, credit to my collabo- 
rator, Herman Rosse, whose wide knowledge of 
the theatre in the Orient, as well as in Europe, 
and of the beginnings of dramatic art in masked 
ceremonials has contributed as much to this 
book as have his many illustrative drawings at 
the head of the text pages. 

Samuel J. Hume, Director of the Greek The- 
atre of the University of California, placed at 
my disposal an unpublished thesis, The Mask, 
Materials for a Monograph, which has provided 
a mass of invaluable fact and reference. A large 
part of his bibliography has been incorporated 
in the list of books and periodicals on pages 
168-173. 

Curators of the eae museums which 

165 


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 


contain all but ten of the masks reproduced, 
have been characteristically generous in their 
help: Stewart Culin, in particular, curator of 
anthropology in the Brooklyn Museum; F. W. 
Hodge, curator of anthropology in the National 
Museum, Washington; Dr. Berthold Laufer, 
curator of anthropology, and Dr. A. B. Lewis, 
assistant curator, in the Field Museum of 
Natural History, Chicago; Prof. Marshall H. 
Saville, Dr. M. R. Harrington, and W. C. 
Orchard, of the Museum of the American In- 
dian, New York; Dr. P. E. Goddard, curator of 
ethnology, Dr. G. Clyde Fisher, associate cura- 
tor of the department of public education, and 
Dorothy Van Vliet, photo-engraving librarian, 
in the American Museum of Natural History, 
New York; Prof. C. C. Willoughby, director of 
the anthropological section of the Peabody Mu- 
seum of Harvard University, Cambridge; J. E. 
Dodge, curator of Chinese and Japanese Art in 
the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Miss J. M. 
McHugh, secretary of the University Museum, 
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Dr. 
Elsie Clews Parsons, Dr. Arthur C. Parker, 
State Archzologist, New York State Museum, 
Albany; Dr. J. W. Fewkes, chief of the Bureau 
of American Ethnology, Smithsonian Institute, 
Washington; Douglas Stewart, assistant direc- 
tor of the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh. 

I owe much aid and criticism, especially as 
applies to German sources, to my wife, Edna B. 
Macgowan. 

The masks, photographs of which -are repro- 
duced in this book, are to De founds in the fol- 
lowing museums: 

[166 |. 


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 


PAGE 


4, 10, 12, 14, 18, 24, 


28, 32, 34, 36, 44, 54, 
58, 66, 68, 76, 80, 82, 


84, 86, 94, 96, 124, 
22080126, 130, 132, 
134, 136, 138, 150, 
152, 156, 158, 160. 


2,,0,25,010,.20, 30, 38, 
40, 56, 62, 78, 90, 92, 
98, 104, 116, 118, 154. 


II0, 
122. 


512, 


TTA, 120, 


22, 64, I00, 140, 142. 


48, 88, 102. 


79, 72, 74. 


20, 60. 


144, 146, 148. 


42. 


50. 


46. 


106, 


108. - 


RACE 


Melanesian, North 
Pacific Indian, Ti- 
betan, Singhalese, 
Egyptian, Hopi, 
Chinese, Javanese. 


Negro, Navaho, Mel- 
anesian, Japanese, 


Apache, Zuni, 
Hopi. 

Japanese. 

Seneca, North Pa- 
cific Indian, Iro- 


quois, Siamese. 
Aztec, North Pacific 
Indian, Brazilian 
Indian. 
Alpine. 


North Pacific In- 
dian, Delaware. 

Javanese. 

Negro. 

ee 

Aztec. 


Roman. 


Roman. 


INSTITUTION 


Field Museum, Chi- 
cago. 


Brooklyn Museum. 


Beston Museum of 
Fine Arts. 


National Museum, 


Washington. 


American Museum 
of Natural His- 
tory, New York. 


Salzburg Museum. 


Museum of the 
American Indian, 
New York. 


State Ethnographic 
Museum, Leiden. 


Carnegie Museum, 
Pittsburgh. 


Prehistoric and Eth- 
nographic Mu- 
seum, Rome. 

British Museum. 


Therman 


_ Museum, 
Rome. ; 


Vatican, Rome. 


The reproduction on page 52 is from a photograph of a 
Mayan carving furnished by the Peabody Museum, Cambridge. 


[167] 


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 


I am aware of only three books dealing exten- 
sively with the general subject of masks. One, 
Masks, Heads, and Faces, by Ellen Russeil 
Emerson, is principally concerned with the rela- 
tion of masks and their markings to religious 
and esthetic significances to be found in various 
treatments of the human face. The Mask Num- 
ber of Wendingen, a Dutch periodical edited by 
H. T. Wijdeveld, contains over a hundred re- 
productions and a number of articles. The 
bibliography of the third publication, a German 
volume, Masken, by Rudolf Utzinger, contain- 
ing forty-eight reproductions, is included in the 
following list of material dealing with masks: 


F. Altmann: Die Masken der Schauspieler. 

R. Andree: Die Masken in der Volkerkunde. Archiv 
fir Anthropologie, Vol XVI, No. II. 

R. Andree: Ethnographische Parallelen und Vergleiche. 

M. Andree-Eysen: Die Perchten im Salzburgischen. 
Archiv fiir Anthropologie. Neue Folge, Vol. III. 

M. Andree-Eysen: Volkskundliches. 

W. Bang: Materialien, etc. 

G. T. Basden: Among the Ibos of Nigeria. 

A. Bastian: Amerikas Nord West Kiiste. 

A. Benazet: Annales du Musée Guimet, Vol. XIII. Le 
Théatre au Japon. 

M. Bartels: Ueber Schaedelmasken.' Festschrift fiir 
Adolf Bastian zu seinem 70 Geburtstag. 

O. Benndorf: Antike Gesichtshelme und Sepulcral- 
masken. 

L. Biart: The Aztecs. 

F. Boas: The Social Organisation and the Secret So- 
cieties of the Kwakiutl Indians. 

F. Boas: The Use of Masks and Head-Ornaments on 
the Northwest Coast of America. Internationales 
Archiv fiir Ethnographie, Vol. III, p. 7. 

E. Botticher: Die Cultusmaske und der Hochsitz des 
Ohres an agyptischen, assyrischen und griechisch- 

I 


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 


romischen Bildwerken. Archiv fiir Anthropologie, 
Vol. XVI. 

. de Bourbourg: Collection des Documents dans les 
Langues Indigenes d’Amerique Ancien. Vol. II. 

G. Bourke: Medicine-Men of the Apache. goth An- 
nual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology. 

. Brozzi: Teatri e spettacoli dei Popoli Orientali. 

. W. Buckham: The Theatre of the Greeks. 

. Buschan: Die Sitten der Volker. 

E. Candler: The Unveiling of Lhassa. 

B. K. Chambers: The Medizval Stage. 

A. and M. Croisset: Manuel d’Histoire de la Littérature 
Grecque. 

W. H. Dall: On Masks, Labrets, and Certain Aboriginal 
Customs. 3d Annual Report, Bureau of American 
Ethnology. 

J. J. M. Degroot: The Religion of the Chinese, also 
Annales du Musée Guimet. Vols. XI, XII. 

O. Dingledein: Haben die Theatermasken der Alten die 
Stimme verstarkt? Berliner studien fiir classische 
phil. und arch., Vol. XI. 

J. W. Donaldson: The Theatre of the Greeks. 

N. Dumarest: Notes on Cochiti, New Mexico. Memoirs 
of the American Anthropological Association, Vol. 
VI, No. 3. 

O. Edwards: Japanese Plays and Playfellows. 

E. R. Emerson: Masks, Heads, and Faces. 

The Encyclopedia Britannica. See Index. 

E. Fenollosa and E. Pound: Noh. 

J. W. Fewkes: Tusayan Katcinas. 15th Annual Report, 
Bureau of American Ethnology. 

F. de Ficoroni: Le Maschere sceniche e le Figure 
Comiche. 

W. Filchner: Das Kloster Kumbum in Tibet. 

O. Finsch: Siidseearbeiten. 

R. K. Flickinger: The Greek Theatre. 

J. G. Frazer: The Golden Bough. 

L. Frobenius: Die Masken und Geheimbiinde Afrikas. 

L. Frobenius: Paideuma. 

L. Frobenius: Ueber oceanische Masken.  Interna- 
tionales Archiv fiir Ethnographie, Vol. II, pp. 82, 


130, 162. 
[169] 


CEO Gea me 


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 


L. Frobenius: Volksmarchen der Kabylen, Vol. I. 

H. H. Gigliol: On Two Ancient Peruvian Masks. In- 
ternationales Archiv fiir Ethnographie, Vol. IV. 

P. E. Goddard: Indians of the Southwest. 

P. E. Goddard: Myths and Tales from the White 
Mountain Apache. Anthropology Papers.of Ameri- 
can Museum of Natural History, Vol. XXIV, 
Part II. 

L. Gouse: Histoire de l’Art du Japon, Vol. II. 

A. Griinwedel: Singhalesische Masken. Internationales 
Archiv fiir Ethnographie, Vol. VI. 

E. Guimet: Le Théatre en Chine. Conferences faites au 
Musée Guimet. Vol. XVII. 

A. C. Haddon: The Secular and Ceremonial Dances of 
Torres Straits. Internationales Archiv fiir Ethnog- 
raphie, Vol. VI, -p. 131, 

C. Hagemann: Schauspielkunst und Schauspielkiinstler. 

C. Hagemann: Spiele der Volker. 

A. E. Haigh: The Attic Theatre. 

H. U. Hall: New. Ireland Masks. Museum Journal, 
Vol. X, No. 4. 

M. R. Harrington: Religion and Ceremonies of the 
Lenape. 

L. Havermeyer: The Drama of Savage Peoples. 

C. A. Hawes: In the Uttermost East. 

S. Hedin: Transhimalaja, Vol. I. 

O. Hense: Die Modifizierung der Maske in der griechi- 
schen Trag6die. 1905. 

L. Hildburgh: Notes on Singhalese Magic. Journal of 
the Royal Anthropological Institute. 

M. A. Hinckes: The Japanese Dance. 

M. Hitomi: Le Japon. 

L. Joly: Legend in Japanese Art. 

R. Karutz: Die afrikanischen Hornermasken. 

R. Karutz: Zur westafrikanischen Maskenkunde. Glo- 
bus, Igor. 

E. F. Knight: Where Three Empires Meet. 

Th. Koch-Griinberg: Zwei Jahre unter den Indianern, 
Vols. I and II. 

G. Korting: Geschichte des Theaters. | 

P. La Croix: Manners, Customs and Dress of the Mid- 
dle Ages, 


[270] 


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 


B. Laufer: Oriental Theatricals. Part I of Guide to the 
Field Museum. 

A. B. Lewis: New Guinea Masks. Field Museum Pub- 
lications. 

P. Loti: The Sacred Drama of Cambodia. The Mask, 
Vol. V. 

F. v. Luschan: Zur Ethnographie des Kaiserin-Augusta- 
Flusses. Baessler-Archiv. 

F. v. Luschan: Zusammenhange und Konvergenz. 

J: P. Mahaffy: History of Greek Literature. 

A. Mansfeld: Urwalddokumente. 

Karl Mantzius: A History of Theatrical Art. 

R.. Martin: Ueber Skeletkult und verwandte Vorstel- 
lungen. 1920. Mitteilungen der Geographisch- 
Ethnographischen Gesellschaft, Ziirich. 

Memoirs of the Peabody Museum on Yucatan, Vol. II. 

P. Mounier: Venice in the 18th Century. 

J. Moura: Royaume du Cambodge. Vol. I. 

F, W. K..Miiller: Einiges itiber No: Masken. 

J. Murdoch: The Point Barrow Eskimo. goth Annual 
Report, Bureau of American Ethnology. 

E. W. Nelson: The Eskimo About Behring Straits. 

Pallegoix: Royaume Thai ou Siam, Vol. I. 

E. C. Parsons: Notes on Zui. Memoirs of the Ameri- 
can Anthropological Association, Vol. IV, Nos. 
3 and 4 

E. C. Parsons: Winter and Summer Dances in Zuni, 
1918. 

HC. bpattons: The Zuni A’dochle and Suuke. Ameri- 
can Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. XVIII, 
No. 3. 

A. Pavie: Mission Pavie Indo-Chine, Vol..I. 

K. Th. Preuss: Bericht iiber meine archdologischen und 
ethnographischen Forschungsreisen in Kolumbien. 
Zeitschrift fiir Ethnologie. 1920—r192I. 

K. Th. Preuss: Der damonische Ursprung des griechi- 
schen Dramas. 1906. Neue Jahrbiicher fiir das 
klassische Altertum, Geschichte und deutsche Lit- 
eratur. 

W. Ridgeway: Origin of Tragedy. 

C. Robert: Die Masken der neueren attischen Komddie. 

C. Robert: Satyrmasken aus Terrakotta. Mitteilungen 


[171] 


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 


des Deutschen Archdologischen Institutes in Athen. 
1878. 

E. de Rougé: Notice sommaire des monuments égyptiens 
du Louvre. 

L. Riitimeyer: Ueber einige archaistische Geratschaften 
und Gebrauche im Kanton Wallis und ihre prahis- 
torischen und ethnographischen Parallelen. Schwei- 
zerisches Archiv fiir Volkskunde. 1916. 

L. Riitimeyer: Ueber Fell-und Kindermasken aus Ceylon. 
Verhandlungen der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft, 
Basel, Vol. XXVIII. 

L. Riitimeyer: Ueber Masken und Maskengebrauche im 
Lotschental (Kanton Wallis). Globus, 1907. 

P. and F. Sarasin: Reisen in Celebes. 

M. H. Saville: Turquoise Mosaic Art in Ancient 
Mexico. 

_E. de Schlagintweit: La Bouddhisme au Tibet. 

Shriften der Gesellschaft fiir Theatergeschichte. 
Deutsche Theaterausstellung. 

W. Smith: The Commedia dell’ Arte. 

F. Starr: The Tastoanes. 

J. Stevenson: Navajo Ceremonials. 8th Annual Report, 
Bureau of American Ethnology. 

M. C. Stevenson: The Zuni Indians. 23d Annual Re- 
port of the Bureau of American Ethnology. 

O. Stoll: Das Geschlechtsleben in der Volkerpsychologie. 

M. C. Stopes: The Plays of Old Japan. 

The Sun, Tokio: Japanese masks classed by Tateki 
Owada. 

A. Tafel: Meine Tibetreise. 

E. Torday and T. A. Joyce: Les Bushongo. Annales du 
Musée de Congo Belge, Series II, Vol. II. 

S. Tsubouchi: The Mask, Vol. IV. 

R. Utzinger: Masken. 

H. R. Voth and G. A. Dorsey: Field Museum of Natural 
History, Anthropological Series, Vol. III. 

L. A. Waddell: The Buddhism of Tibet. 

A. Waley: The No Plays of Japan. 

Warsage: Histoire des Marionettes. Dessins Armand 
Henrion. Le Théatre de Laurent Broders a Brux- 
elles. Marionettes et Guignols. 

Wendingen, June-July, 1920. 


[172] 


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 


Zur Westafricanischen Masken. Globus, Vol. LXXIX, 
Dy sor. 

R. Zeller: Die Bundu-Gesellschaft. Ein Geheimbund der 
Sierra Leone. 


[173] 








THE LINE DRAWINGS 


A Tibetan Mask. 

Masked Actors, Greece. 

The May Spirit, Jack-in-the-Green. 

Face Paint as Mask, Melanesia. 

Sawfish Dance, Torres Strait. 

A Wolf-follower of Odysseus in a Greek Comedy. 
Egyptian Masked Gods. 

A Badger Beggar, Japan. 

A Fox Dancer, Japan. 

The Demon Tuculcha on an Etruscan Tomb. 
An African Mask. 

A Solitary Roaming Demon, New Guinea. 

A Giant Mask, British Columbia. 

The Iroquois False Face Company. 

A Medicine Mask of a Singhalese Devil Dancer. 
Bag and Helmet Masks, Arizona and New Mexico. 
The Egyptian God Anubis on an Etruscan Vase. 
A Hawaiian Feather Helmet. 

A Spirit Mask, New Guinea. 

A Spirit Mask, New Guinea. 

A Mask and Costume of Leaves, Torres Strait. 
A Spiritualistic Séance, Nigeria. 

An Animal Totem Mask, Africa. 

African Masked Gods. 

Umbrella Masks of Unknown Gods, New Britain. 
A Mosaic Skull Mask, Mexico. 

A Masked Idol, Mexico. 

Mosaic Masks, Mexico. 

Mayan Heiroglyphics. 

Disciplinary Masks, New Britain. 

The Ku Klux, America. 

Leaf Costume and Mask, New Guinea. 


[175] 


THE LINE DRAWINGS 


The Living Solid Face Goes Herding. 
Shields as Masks, Melanesia. 
Symbolic Headdresses, Melanesia. 
A Potlatch, British Columbia. 
A Primitive War Mask, Melanesia. 
The Devil as Policeman in a Hungarian Nine- 
teenth Century Miracle Play. 
A Medizval Christmas Reveler. 
A Swiss Mask. 
Super-gods of the South Seas. 
An Apache Initiation Ceremony. 
The Thunderbird, British Columbia. 
Initiates Costumes, New Guinea. 
An Eagle Dancer, Alaska. 
A Sunrise Mask, North Pacific Coast. 
A Hand-Mask, British Columbia. 
A Hopi Ceremonial. 
Zuni War God Idols. 
The Giant Courier Gods of the Rain-Makers, Zufii. 
A Sun Mask, Zuni. 
The Plumed Serpent Marionette, Zuni. 
A Greek Comedy Scene. 
Harlequin and Zany, Commedia dell’ Arte. 
Mud Heads on a Pueblo Roof, Zuni. 
A Greek Tragic Mask. 
A Greek Comedy Scene. 
A Japanese Mask. 
Cloth Masks for the Kitchen Gods of Purity, Japan. 
A Japanese Masker. 
A Dengaku Dancer, Japan. 
A No Mask. 
A No Mask. 
A No Mask. 
A Chinese Stage. 
Kuan-yin, the Chinese Madonna. 
The Mask of the Purgatorial Sheriff, China. 
The Mask of General Bull, China. 
A Japanese Lion Dance. 
A Tibetan Demon Mask. 
The Atsara, Tibet. 
A Tibetan Admonitory Mask. 
[176] 


THE LINE DRAWINGS 


Page 

141 A Painted Dancer of Cambodia. 

143. A Siamese Dancer. 

145 Javanese Maskers. 

147. A Javanese Shadow Puppet. 

149 Puppets of the Javanese Wayang Golek. 

151 A Javanese Theatrical Mask. _ 

153 Javanese Court Actors. 

155 A Japanese Masked Actor. 

157  Fourteen-foot Feather Masks and a Policeman, 
Melanesia. 

159 A Singhalese Theatrical Mask. 

161 Masks Plain and Painted. 

163 A Melanesian Mask. 

165 A Mosaic Helmet, Mexico. 

175 A Tibetan Mask. | 


[177] 








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